Plans for the flyby are well under way - and now, so is an effort to petition the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate the historic achievements of New Horizons on a stamp. The mission team launches that petition today, in early 2012, and plans to submit the petitioners' names and a formal proposal to the U.S. post office knowing it often takes three years or longer for a proposal to result in an actual stamp.

"You can help make this happen," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. "We're asking people to sign the petition, because the post office considers not just the merits of a new stamp proposal, but also whether it is supported by a significant number of people. This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore."

The Southwest Research Institute's Dan Durda, a space scientist and artist whose works appear on the New Horizons website and many other venues, has designed a concept for a new Pluto stamp - which would be the successor to the 1990 U.S. postage stamp that labeled Pluto as "Not Yet Explored."

You can help by signing the petition urging the post office's Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee to recommend a New Horizons stamp to the postmaster general. Tell your family members, Facebook friends and Twitter followers to sign as well!

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Laurel MD (SPX) Jan 31, 2012 - New Horizons might be more than two billion miles from home, but the spacecraft has spent most of the new year at the fingertips of its operators.

Since waking the spacecraft from hibernation on Jan. 3, the New Horizons mission operation team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland has uploaded a new set of commands to the spacecraft's computer; made sure its digital data recorders were in working order; primed the communications system for testing of the Radio Science Experiment (REX); refreshed the memory on one of the Guidance and Control processor memory banks; and prepped the Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) and Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instruments for more than three months of science-data collection. The team has now returned the spacecraft to hibernation.

"It's been a busy month, full of housekeeping and maintenance, and we were ready to put the spacecraft back into hibernation," says New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman, of APL. "New Horizons is in great shape."

The commands - transmitted, like all communications with New Horizons, through NASA's Deep Space Network - will guide activities on the spacecraft until May. In recent weeks the team also partially filled both of the spacecraft's digital data recorders with a "test pattern" -ones and zeroes - to check that the recorders could both absorb and download data without problem.

And they also carried out a small maneuver on Jan. 24 to precess New Horizons' antenna toward the point where Earth will be on April 30, for the start of the annual spacecraft checkout.

The REX tests took place on Jan 21. The team took advantage of a fortuitous Earth-moon-spacecraft alignment that allowed it to simulate the occultation technique New Horizons will use in 2015 to probe Pluto's atmosphere and to search for an atmosphere around Pluto's largest moon, Charon.

During the actual encounter, after New Horizons flies by Pluto, its 83-inch (2.1-meter) dish antenna will point back at Earth. Powerful transmitters in the largest Deep Space Network antennas will beam radio signals to the spacecraft as it passes behind Pluto, and then Charon.

The radio waves will bend by an amount that depends on the average molecular weight of gas in the atmosphere and the atmospheric temperature.

For this month's REX test, "Earth's moon passed through our line of sight to the spacecraft, which is exactly what will happen during occultations at Pluto and Charon," says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, also of APL. "We don't expect to detect the moon's very tenuous atmosphere, but the data will be good enough to confirm that REX is working properly."

After this month's wakeup, the SWAP and PEPSSI instruments will be turned on to collect, for the first time, an extensive amount of science data during a hibernation period. A test last fall showed the instruments could work without "distracting" the super-sensitive Venetia Burney Dust Counter, which records "hits" of tiny space-dust particles and is typically the only instrument that operates during hibernation.

"SWAP and PEPSSI have a chance to make detailed measurements of the solar wind out between Uranus and Neptune using instruments far more capable than those on Pioneer 10 and 11 or the Voyagers, the only other spacecraft that have ventured so far from home," says APL's Ralph McNutt, PEPSSI principal investigator.

"Of equal importance is the role such data can provide in understanding the interaction of the solar wind with the local interstellar medium, adding these New Horizons instruments to a network of instruments on the Voyagers, Cassini at Saturn, and the IBEX spacecraft at Earth looking at this grand interaction of cosmic plasma."

The team will download the data from the REX, SWAP and PEPSSI activities in May, during the annual checkout. Results from the Student Dust Counter instrument were recently published in the Geophysical Research Letters; click here.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Pasadena CA (SPX) Jan 24, 2012 - In the distant outer Solar System, rings are nearly ubiquitous. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings, leaving Pluto as the only outer planet without rings.

But PSI Senior Scientist Henry Throop would love to change that. Using both giant telescopes on Earth, and a small spacecraft currently on its way to Pluto, Throop is searching for signs that Pluto may have rings orbiting it, just like its neighbors.

Astronomers expect that Pluto could well have rings - they've just never been discovered.

Throop presented results from one study at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Nantes, France in October 2011. In the study, Throop and his co-authors used data from the four-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia.

"From the ground, Pluto's rings would be too faint and too small to see directly. But occasionally, Pluto passes in front of a distant star, and that lets us study it in exquisite detail," Throop said.

"As Pluto passes in front of the star, the star's light blinks out, like a moth blocking out the beam from a flashlight. We searched through the observations to try to find any hint that the star light was being blocked by rings of Pluto."

So far, they haven't found any rings. But Throop will keep looking. He is working with NASA's New Horizons mission, which is sending a spacecraft to Pluto, to arrive in 2015.

When it passes by Pluto, one of New Horizons' goals will be to conduct a search for rings, at much greater sensitivities than can be done from the Earth.

And ironically, Throop's search now will actually help plan the encounter in 2015.

"Rings are made of tiny dust grains, and we want to be sure that New Horizons will not collide with anything at Pluto," he said. "By knowing where there aren't rings, we help assure a safe path where the spacecraft will fly."

When New Horizons reaches the Pluto system, the spacecraft will provide a wealth of new data about this mysterious region of the Solar System. Studying worlds like Pluto can teach astrobiologists about how dwarf planets form and evolve.

This information can ultimately help us determine the types of planets that could exist throughout the Universe. Scientists are still unsure of what we will find at Pluto.

Some research suggests that deposits of primordial organic matter might lie on the tiny world's surface - and liquid water may exist a hundred miles below ground.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Boulder CO (SPX) Jan 20, 2012 - Today - as we mark the sixth anniversary of our launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on January 19, 2006 - New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now more than 22 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is.

Our nine-year flight from launch to the beginning of Pluto encounter in January 2015 is two-thirds over. As a result, we're entering the final three-year segment of our long interplanetary trek from Earth to Pluto, called "Late Cruise."

Even as we enter Late Cruise, I can already feel the pace of activities picking up. As you read this, New Horizons is awake and being put through various test activities during a record-length, monthlong January hibernation wakeup, and all is going well. When this wakeup ends, we'll cruise in hibernation through February, March and April while planning an intensive two-month wakeup that will span May and June.

The highlight of this summer's wakeup will be a "24 hour" near-encounter rehearsal, during which we'll execute a (nearly) daylong segment of our Pluto encounter sequence on the spacecraft. During this test - our first in-flight encounter rehearsal - New Horizons will make every maneuver, every scan and every observation that it actually will do around closest approach in 2015.

Following that rehearsal, recorded engineering and science data will be played back to Earth and be used to search for even the tiniest discrepancies from plan.

In addition to the rehearsal, we'll check out every system (and its backup) on New Horizons; check out each of the seven scientific instruments; collect more science data than we have in any previous wakeup; and update the software for our primary spacecraft command and control computer, removing a bug that occasionally causes it to reset.

As if that's not enough, we'll also uplink almost two-dozen improvements to our onboard autonomous fault detection and automatic response software, many of which are necessary to begin encounter-sequence testing and to carry out the encounter itself. All of these activities need to go well to put us in good shape for a complete, nine-day encounter rehearsal in 2013.

Also this summer, planetary scientists on and collaborating with the New Horizons team will use a wide variety of telescopes to intensively probe the space between Pluto and Charon for possible satellites, rings and other kinds of debris structures.

And while the science team is looking for Pluto system hazards, our spacecraft engineering team, under the leadership of Chris Hersman from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will begin to work through some 260-plus malfunction and contingency scenarios that we've identified as possible "gotchas" at Pluto. For each scenario, the team will prepare and test automatic onboard or ground-control responses.

And our mission operations ("mission ops") team, led by Alice Bowman at APL, will complete plans for the two weeks of flight that surround either side of our nine-day-long closest approach sequence at Pluto.

Working with our Pluto Encounter Planning team, led by Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Young at Southwest Research Institute, the mission ops group will also prioritize and then write command sequences that create the almost-yearlong data playback that will occur after the encounter concludes in late summer 2015.

The data New Horizons sends back - maps, spectra, plasma data, radio science and more - will provide a detailed view of Pluto and its system of moons. Our knowledge of Pluto will literally expand from a single fact sheet's worth of information, to textbook-length tomes.

When we started this journey in January 2006, the nearly decade-long cruise to the Pluto system seemed daunting indeed. But with six years behind us, and only three years to go, we on New Horizons are actually worried about how little time we have to complete all that's left to do! After all, starting this year and carrying through 2013, 2014 and 2015, the pace of activity will continue to accelerate! Soon, we'll actually be hiring new staff to help us take on much of that work.

Time flies, and so does New Horizons!

Well, that's my update for now. Thanks again for following our journey across the deep ocean of space, to a truly new frontier.

I hope you'll keep on exploring - just as we do!

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Boulder, CO (SPX) Dec 21, 2011 - The new and highly sensitive Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto's surface, providing new evidence that points to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon and/or nitrile molecules lying on the surface, according to a paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal by researchers from Southwest Research Institute and Nebraska Wesleyan University.

Such chemical species can be produced by the interaction of sunlight or cosmic rays with Pluto's known surface ices, including methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen.

The project, led by SwRI's Dr. Alan Stern, also included SwRI researchers Dr. John Spencer and Adam Shinn, and Nebraska Wesleyan University researchers Dr. Nathaniel Cunningham and student Mitch Hain.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy color," said Stern.

The team also discovered evidence of changes in Pluto's ultraviolet spectrum compared to Hubble measurements from the 1990s.

The changes may be related to differing terrains seen now versus in the 1990s, or to other effects, such as changes in the surface related to a steep increase in the pressure of Pluto's atmosphere during that same time span.

"The discovery we made with Hubble reminds us that even more exciting discoveries about Pluto's composition and surface evolution are likely to be in store when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives at Pluto in 2015," Stern added.

This research was supported by a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

A copy of the science paper by Stern et al. is available here. Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Laurel MD (SPX) Dec 05, 2011 - NASA's New Horizons mission reached a special milestone this past week on its way to reconnoiter the Pluto system, coming closer to Pluto than any other spacecraft.

It's taken New Horizons 2,143 days of high-speed flight - covering more than a million kilometers per day for nearly six years-to break the closest-approach mark set by NASA's Voyager 1 in January 1986.

Pluto wasn't on Voyager's mission path, but after making historic flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, the intrepid probe came about 983 million miles (1.58 billion kilometers) from Pluto as it raced to the solar system's outskirts.

Now New Horizons, which is healthy, on course and closer to Pluto than Voyager ever came, will continue to set proximity-to-Pluto records every day until its closest approach - about 7,767 miles (12,500 kilometers) from the planet - on July 14, 2015.

"We've come a long way across the solar system," says Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

"When we launched [on Jan. 19, 2006] it seemed like our 10-year journey would take forever, but those years have been passing us quickly. We're almost six years in flight, and it's just about three years until our encounter begins."

From New Horizons' current distance to Pluto - as far as Earth is (on average) from Saturn - Pluto remains just a faint point of light. But by the time New Horizons sails through the Pluto system in mid-2015, the planet and its moons will be so close that the spacecraft's cameras will spot features as small as a football field.

"What a cool milestone!" says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. "Although we're still a long way - 1.5 billion kilometers from Pluto - we're now in new territory as the closest any spacecraft has ever gotten to Pluto, and getting closer every day by over a million kilometers.

"I wonder how long it will be until the next Pluto spacecraft - perhaps a future orbiter or lander - crosses this distance marker?" he continues. "It could be decades."

New Horizons is currently in hibernation, with all but its most essential systems turned off, speeding away from the Sun at more than 34,500 miles (55,500 kilometers) per hour. Operators at the Applied Physics Lab will "wake" the spacecraft in January for a month of testing and maintenance activities.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Moffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 18, 2011 - When NASA's New Horizons cruises by Pluto in 2015, the images it captures could help astronomers determine if an ocean is hiding under the frigid surface, opening the door to new possibilities for liquid water to exist on other bodies in the solar system. New research has not only concluded such an ocean is likely, but also has highlighted features the spacecraft could identify that could help confirm an ocean's existence.

Pluto's outer surface is composed of a thin shell of nitrogen ice, covering a shell of water ice. Planetary scientists Guillaume Robuchon and Francis Nimmo, both of the University of California at Santa Cruz, wanted to find out whether or not an ocean could exist underneath this icy shell, and what visible signs such an ocean might produce on the surface.

The pair modeled the thermal evolution of the dwarf planet and studied the behavior of the shell to see how the surface would be affected by the presence of an ocean below.

Searching the surface
Ironically, the easiest feature to identify would appear if no ocean existed. As spherical bodies spin, their angular momentum tends to push material towards the equator, forming a bulge. If Pluto boasts a liquid layer, the ice would flow, reducing such a protrusion. Thus, the appearance of a "frozen-in"primordial bulge, left over from when Pluto spun more rapidly, would signify a lack of ocean.

"If the bulge is present, it will be about 6 miles (10 km) high, so it should be readily detectable," Nimmo said. New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver agreed on the last point.

"New Horizon imaging will measure the shape of Pluto very accurately."

Launched in 2006, the NASA mission should reach Pluto in April of 2015. In addition to determining the contours of Pluto, it will also study the temperature, the atmospheric makeup, and the solar wind around the distant planet.

The surface features and composition also will be targets. These surface features could provide hints as to what lies beneath.

As Pluto cooled over its lifetime, the temperature changes resulted in a change in volume, creating surface stresses. Classifying these features should reveal whether or not they overlie an ocean.

Icy water beneath the shell would result in tensional stresses as the ice was stretched, while a solid layer would have meant compressional stresses as the material was squeezed.

Such fractures would likely span the globe, rather than being unique to specific areas.

This is ideal, since New Horizons will not map the entire surface of Pluto. Because of the complications involved in going into orbit, the craft will only fly past the icy dwarf planet. But imaging will begin around three months before its closest approach.

"New Horizons will map the entire sunlit surface of Pluto," Weaver explained, "but only the hemisphere facing the spacecraft near the time of the flyby will be mapped at the highest resolution."

The highest resolution will capture 62 meters per pixel when the craft is within 7,750 miles (12,500 km). However, the more distant images still will be approximately ten times more detailed than those captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ridges and valleys with heights and depths of 260 feet (80 meters) should be distinguishable.

Other potential features include geysers similar to those found on Saturn's moon Enceladus and Neptune's moon Triton.

Water on an icy planet
At an average of forty times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, Pluto seems an unlikely candidate for harboring an ocean, even underground. But the heat that might melt the ice would come from inside.

The main source of energy likely stems from the rocky interior, where isotopes undergo radioactive decay. Among these elements, the researchers found potassium to be key - enough potassium in Pluto's core would result in melted ice above it.

And signs look good - the amount of potassium needed would be about a tenth of that found in meteorites from the early solar system.

"I think there is a good chance that Pluto has enough potassium to maintain an ocean," Nimmo said.

An important factor that would influence the formation of an ocean is the viscosity of the ice, or how much it resists flowing. A slushier ice shell would suck the heat from the water beneath it, causing the ocean to freeze, while a more solid, high-viscosity shell would not.

According to the models, the planet-wide ocean would have an average depth of approximately 100 miles (165 km), beneath a crust of ice of the same thickness.

The growing habitable zone
Scientists regard water as necessary for life as we know it, so focus tends to fall on the habitable zone around stars, the region where temperatures allow for liquid water to exist on a rocky planet.

But in our solar system, liquid water is already anticipated to exist outside this region. Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto may each contain a sea beneath their icy surfaces, and Saturn's moon Titan also shows hints of an underground water ocean.

According to Nimmo, Pluto is unlikely to contain life because the organic nutrients considered necessary were probably leached away years ago.

However, if a subsurface ocean exists on the dwarf planet, then other objects in the Kuiper belt are potentially more habitable than previously suspected.

"They almost certainly have oceans too, since some are about the size of Pluto," Nimmo said.

Such objects could contain not only liquid water but the necessary ingredients for life that Pluto probably lacks.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Boulder CO (SPX) Nov 08, 2011 - New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now almost two times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, and approaching six years into its 9.5-year journey to the Pluto system.

We've taken the spacecraft out of hibernation to perform maintenance activities, and to re-point our radio antenna to compensate for Earth's movement around its orbit. This "hibernation wakeup" started November 5 and will last until November 15. Then New Horizons will hibernate again until early January, when we'll perform a more extensive, almost month-long wakeup.

I'll provide an update soon about how the November hibernation wakeup went and what's in store for the January wake up and our cruise to Active Checkout 6, which begins next May. But in this PI's log, I want to concentrate on a question that has recently come to the fore on the mission: "Is the Pluto system dangerous to New Horizons?"

If you're wondering what I mean, I'm referring to the fact that the more moons that pop up in the system, the more we have to worry that there are still more undiscovered moons that are too small and faint to detect.

When we discovered P4 this summer, along with possible evidence of a couple of still-fainter moons (something we need more study to confirm or reject), we began to worry about just how many tiny moons Pluto might have and whether we might have to dodge them.

Even more worrisome than the possibility of many small moons themselves is the concern that these moons will generate debris rings, or even 3-D debris clouds around Pluto that could pose an impact hazard to New Horizons as it flies through the system at high speed. After all, at our 14-kilometer-per-second flyby speed, even particles less than a milligram can penetrate our micrometeoroid blankets and do a lot of damage to electronics, fuel lines and sensors.

So to assess that hazard, we brought together about 20 of the world's experts in ring systems, orbital dynamics and state-of-the-art astronomical observing techniques to search for small satellites and rings at distant Pluto.

This group convened November 3-4 at the Southwest Research Institute's offices in Boulder, Colo., where the New Horizons science team is centered. During this two-day workshop, a series of technical talks and discussions sections examined every aspect of the hazards that debris and small moons orbiting in the Pluto system might pose.

We found a plausible chance that New Horizons might face real danger of a killer impact; and that to mitigate that hazard, we need to undertake two broad classes of work.

First, we need to look harder at the Pluto system for still undiscovered satellites and rings. The best tools for this are going to be the Hubble Space Telescope, some very large ground-based telescopes, telescopes that can make stellar occultation observations of the space between Pluto and Charon where New Horizons is currently targeted, and thermal observations of the system by the ALMA radio telescope array just now being commissioned.

Then, we need to plan for an alternate, safer route through the Pluto system in case those observations reveal strong evidence that our current trajectory is too hazardous.

Studies presented at the Encounter Hazards Workshop indicate that a good "safe haven bailout trajectory" (or SHBOT) could be designed to target a closest-approach aim point about 10,000 kilometers farther than our nominal mission trajectory.

More specifically, a good candidate SHBOT aim point would be near Charon's orbit, but about 180 degrees away from Charon on closest-approach day. Why this location? Because Charon's gravity clears out the region close to it of debris, creating a safe zone.

Making this situation still more complex is the fact that debris created in the Pluto system may not lie in a plane, as in other ring systems, but might instead be contained in a fat torus (donut-shaped) or even a nearly-spherical 3-D cloud if the debris coming off small satellites has high velocity (such debris is created by impactors from the Kuiper Belt, which hit at pretty high speeds of 1-2 kilometers per second.)

The question of whether the Pluto system could be hazardous to New Horizons remains open -but one we'll be studying hard over the next year, with everything from computer models to big ground-based telescopes to the Hubble.

I'll report on results as we obtain them, but it is not lost on us that there is a certain irony that the very object of our long-held scientific interest and affection may, after so many years of work to reach her, turn out to be less hospitable than other planets have been. We'll see.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Paris (AFP) Oct 26, 2011 - Sky-watchers reported on Wednesday that a small planet in deep space that triggered one of the fiercest controversies in modern astronomy appears to be a colder "twin" of Pluto.

The study, published in the journal Nature, is the biggest probe into the enigmatic planet known as Eris, whose discovery in 2005 raised questions about the Kuiper Belt, a zone of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Eris stunned astronomers. It was initially estimated to be as big as Pluto, which had been enshrined as the Solar System's smallest, outermost planet after discovery in 1930.

The existence of Eris implied that scores, maybe even hundreds, more planets were just waiting to be spotted in the Kuiper Belt.

But were these objects -- even Pluto itself -- big enough to be considered real planets?

The question was answered in 2006, when Pluto was relegated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to a new category of "dwarf planet," where it has been joined by Eris, the big asteroid Ceres and two other large Kuiper belt objects, Makemake and Haumea.

Pluto's downsizing was unpopular with the public and is hotly contested even today by many astronomers, thus making Eris' name -- after the Greek goddess of strife and discord -- very apt.

The new probe used two giant telescopes in Chile's Atacama desert, which observed Eris as it passed in front of a star in November 2010, gaining clues about its size and surface from the distorted starlight.

This is a technical feat, for Eris was nearly 100 times as distant from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. It is the most distant object in the Solar System to be successfully observed this way.

The tableau of Eris that emerges is of a sphere-shaped object with a diameter of 2,326 kms (1,453 miles), plus or minus 12 kms (eight miles), which is a fraction smaller than earlier measurements.

In size terms, it is strangely a near-double of Pluto, whose diameter is estimated at 2,300-2,400 kms (1,437 -1,500 miles).

The surface of Eris is unusually bright, which suggests that it has an icy covering that is somehow refreshed. If the surface were permanently like this, it would become darkened by cosmic rays and impacts by micro-meteorites over time.

The theory is that Eris has a methane-rich atmosphere that in the depths of space freezes to the surface but occasionally revives and then freezes again.

When the wee planet reaches the closest part of its elliptical orbit around the Sun -- a "mere" 30 astronomical units (AUs), or 30 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun -- its frozen surface warms just enough to become gassy and create a thin but temporary atmosphere.

As it heads once more away from the Sun, the atmosphere freezes once more, clinging to the surface, according to this scenario.

"In that case, Eris would currently be a dormant Pluto twin, with a bright icy surface created by a collapsed atmosphere," suggests the paper, headed by Bruno Sicardy of the Pierre et Marie Curie University and Observatory of Paris.

Eris has a satellite, Dysnomia, named after the goddess' offspring and derived from the ancient Greek for lawlessness.

Mother and daughter take half a millennium -- 557 years -- to crawl around the Sun. Pluto and its moonlets complete their trip in a relatively brisk 248 years.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Laurel MD (SPX) Oct 26, 2011 - The team behind NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt has launched a free app that takes iPhone and iPad users along on this historic voyage to the planetary frontier.

Now available in the iTunes App Store, "New Horizons: A NASA Voyage to Pluto" brings users the latest news and pictures from the mission, as well as details on the spacecraft and science instruments, and offers access to educational programs and activities.

Main features include reports from the New Horizons news center and Twitter feed; stunning images of New Horizons or those taken by the spacecraft's cameras; videos that tell the New Horizons story; and a "tour" of the New Horizons spacecraft.

The app includes a locator for following New Horizons along its path toward Pluto, and a countdown clock to check exactly how much time remains - down to the second - before New Horizons sails past the dwarf planet and four moons on July 14, 2015.

Another tool connects users to the "Ice Hunters" program to find potential New Horizons flyby targets in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto.

"The New Horizons team excited to share the adventure of discovery with the larger public that iTunes can reach," says New Horizons Project Manager Glen Fountain, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

The app was produced by programmers at APL, which built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 08:59:18 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D