|  Huge Canyon Spied on Pluto Moon Charon (Photos)  | NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has spotted multiple craters and canyons on Pluto's big moon Charon, including one chasm that appears to be longer and deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon, mission team members said. The photo also provides a good look at the 200-mile-wide (320 kilometers) dark patch at Charon's north pole, whose origin and nature remain mysterious. "This is the first clear evidence of faulting and surface disruption on Charon," William McKinnon, deputy lead scientist with New Horizons' geology and geophysics investigation team, said in a statement.
| Read More » First Flybys: From Mercury to Pluto, a History of Solar System Surveys  | Humanity is now just one day away from completing the initial reconnaissance of our local home in the universe. A journey nine years in the making, but which dates back more than a half century to our first encounter with another planet, NASA's New Horizons robotic spacecraft will fly by Pluto at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) on Tuesday (July 14), soaring past the final world in our classical solar system. The piano-sized probe, traveling at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/h) some 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) away from Earth, will come within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet, flying close enough to Pluto that if New Horizons was the same distance away from Earth, its camera would not only discern New York City, but also the ponds within Manhattan's Central Park.
| Read More » Pluto at Last! NASA Spacecraft Arrives for Dwarf Planet Close-Up Tuesday  | On Tuesday morning (July 14) — nine and a half years after launching, and a quarter-century after its mission began to take shape — NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will perform history's first flyby of Pluto. Closest approach will occur at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) Tuesday, when New Horizons zooms within just 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the dwarf planet's frigid surface. "It's thrilling," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com.
| Read More » 'Surfer's Waves' Found in Space  | Researchers have discovered a breaking-wave pattern over the magnetosphere, the magnetic field that surrounds Earth. As seen in a new NASA image, these waves look similar to the ocean waves that surfers crave. Waves caused by a fast-moving fluid traveling over a slow-moving fluid are called Kelvin-Helmholtz waves.
| Read More » Rare Harpy Eagle Chick Captured in New Pics  | Harpy eagles nesting high above the understory of the Peruvian rainforest have been captured in a series of stunning new photos. Because the giant bird of prey lives in the darkest portions of the rainforest and hunts its quarry in dead silence, many Peruvian Amazon birders can go their entire lives without seeing one, said nature photographer Jeff Cremer, who photographed the eagles. Harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) are imposing creatures.
| Read More » Does Science Back Samsung's 80% Battery Boost Claim? But could the new battery really boost battery life by that much? "I don't see it as a breakthrough technology," John B. Goodenough, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, and the man who invented the lithium-ion battery, told Live Science. Lithium-ion batteries on the market today generate power by using lithium cobalt oxide as the positive terminal (the cathode), with carbon, usually in the form of graphite, as the negative terminal (the anode), and a lithium polymer compound as the electrolyte. Read More » Ancient Native Americans May Have Had Pet Bobcat A 2,000-year-old burial mound discovered in the area that's now Illinois contained the remains of a young bobcat, new research reveals. The ancient bobcat was wearing a special collar and was found in a ritual burial mound normally reserved for humans. "It really looked like it had been buried not because it was a feral accessory for a human, but because it was, in some way, kind of respected on its own," said study co-author Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Read More » For Girls, Mom's Physical Activity Level Sets the Example The study of 40 girls ages 5 to 12 found that those with more active mothers were more physically active themselves. "Mothers are the first potentially powerful female role model for their daughters, and their daughters' beliefs and behaviors may stem directly from those of their mothers," said study co-author Alyce Barnes, an education researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia. "Importantly, our study has shown that mothers have an important influence on their daughter's physical activity in relation to their parenting for physical activity and behaviors," Barnes said. Read More » Volvo's Scary-Looking Front Car Seat Is Probably Safe  | Volvo recently unveiled a new concept for a car with a change that may scare some parents: The front passenger seat is a baby car seat that swivels and then locks in place to face the rear of the car.
| Read More » Why Your Birth Date May Not Match Your Body's Age The researchers determined these participants' "biological ages" based on how well their body systems were working. They found that the participants' biological ages ranged from 28 to 61. "We set out to measure aging in these relatively young people," the study's first author, Dan Belsky, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the Duke University Center for Aging and Human Development, said in a statement. Read More » Supersonic Jet Could Fly People from NYC to London in 3 Hours  | A new luxury jet could get you (and 17 of your closest friends) from New York to London in just 3 hours. Spike Aerospace's S-512 Supersonic Jet was introduced in 2013, but the Boston-based company recently announced a few exciting updates to the plane's design that could make it safer for jetsetters. Spike Aerospace's engineers claim the S-512 could reach a maximum speed of Mach 1.8 (1,370 mph, or 2,205 km/h), which is 1.8 times the speed of sound.
| Read More » Little Pluto bigger than scientists thought as flyby looms  | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Little Pluto is a little bigger than anyone imagined.
| Read More » Why Do People Love Pluto?  | Pluto — the once (and to some people, forever) ninth planet of the solar system — gets a lot of love from the general public. When Pluto's official status in the solar system was changed from "planet" to "dwarf planet," the public outcry was overwhelming. Neil deGrasse Tyson received angry letters from kids who disagreed with the decision, and the majority of people still think Pluto should retain "planet" status.
| Read More » Pluto Is Larger Than Thought, Has Ice Cap, NASA Probe Reveals  | With less than 24 hours to go before NASA's New Horizons probe makes its close flyby of Pluto, scientists are already learning more about the dwarf planet than ever before, including the fact that it is bigger than previously thought. New Horizons' latest views of Pluto have shown the dwarf planet to be 1,473 miles (2,370 kilometers) across, making it the largest body in the icy Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system. The observations also confirmed the presence of a polar ice cap on Pluto, and measured three of the dwarf planet's moons.
| Read More » NASA's New Horizons probe finds Pluto is bigger than predicted  | By Irene Klotz LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - Mysterious Pluto looms large and turns out to be larger than expected as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft wraps up a nearly decade-long journey, with a close flyby on track for Tuesday, scientists said on Monday. The nuclear-powered probe was in position to pass dead center of a 60-by-90-mile (97-by-145 km) target zone between the orbits of Pluto and its primary moon, Charon, at 7:49 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, said managers at New Horizons mission control center, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside of Baltimore. During the 30-minute dash past Pluto and its entourage of five moons, New Horizons will perform a carefully choreographed series of maneuvers to position its cameras and science instruments for hundreds of observations.
| Read More » NASA's New Horizons probe finds Pluto is bigger than predicted  | By Irene Klotz LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - Mysterious Pluto looms large and turns out to be larger than expected as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft wraps up a nearly decade-long journey, with a close flyby on track for Tuesday, scientists said on Monday. The nuclear-powered probe was in position to pass dead centre of a 60-by-90-mile (97-by-145 km) target zone between the orbits of Pluto and its primary moon, Charon, at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) on Tuesday, said managers at New Horizons mission control centre, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside of Baltimore. During the 30-minute dash past Pluto and its entourage of five moons, New Horizons will perform a carefully choreographed series of manoeuvres to position its cameras and science instruments for hundreds of observations.
| Read More » Will LSST Solve the Mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? (Kavli Hangout)  | Adam Hadhazy, writer and editor for The Kavli Foundation, contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. During a traditional Chilean stone-laying ceremony, the first building block of a powerful new astronomical observatory, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), was placed in the ground on Cerro Pachón in Chile April 14. Although LSST will not see first light until 2022, the astronomical community is already abuzz about how this ambitious project will open up the "dark universe" of dark matter and dark energy as never before.
| Read More » Lifting the Veil on Pluto's Atmosphere  | Sophia Nasr is a science writer for Simulation Curriculum's free Pluto Safari app. You might guess that a small and distant world almost 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth is from the sun would not have an atmosphere, but in the case of Pluto, you'd be wrong. In fact, Pluto is a complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns.
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