|  Mysterious Ice Plains Spotted on Pluto (Video)  | Not far from a range of giant ice mountains on Pluto lies a vast stretch of icy plains whose surface is broken into giant cell-like blocks by snaking troughs, new photos by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveal. The engimatic region — which the mission team is calling "Sputnik Planum," after the satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 — also features isolated hills of uncertain height, mysterious pitted terrain and dark streaks of material that may have been deposited by Plutonian winds. You can fly over Sputnik Planum in this amazing video, which NASA released today (July 17).
| Read More » NASA scientist Claudia Alexander, last Galileo project manager, dies at 56 NASA scientist Claudia Alexander, who was a project manager for the Galileo spacecraft mission to Jupiter and worked on the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet chaser, has died at age 56. Alexander died on July 11 after a 10-year battle with breast cancer, NASA said on its website this week. Read More » Dawn Probe Back in Action at Dwarf Planet Ceres After Glitch  | NASA's Dawn spacecraft has resumed its trek to a new orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, more than two weeks after a glitch halted the probe in its tracks. Dawn began spiraling down to its third Ceres science orbit on June 30 but experienced a problem almost immediately and went into a protective "safe mode." After an investigation, the mission team has now determined what happened and cleared Dawn to return to work. Dawn has three ion engines and uses only one at a time," NASA officials wrote in an update today (July 17).
| Read More » Seattle's long-broken tunnel-boring machine set to resume Nov. 23  | The world's largest-diameter tunneling machine could resume drilling under downtown Seattle in late November after repairs are completed, allowing a central part of a years-delayed highway project to go forward, Washington state officials said on Friday. The broken machine, known as Bertha, stopped working in December 2013 after digging just 10 percent of a planned tunnel to replace an aging waterfront highway. It was stuck for more than a year underneath downtown Seattle.
| Read More » NASA scientist Claudia Alexander, last Galileo project manager, dies at 56 NASA scientist Claudia Alexander, who was a project manager for the Galileo spacecraft mission to Jupiter and worked on the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet chaser, has died at age 56. Alexander died on July 11 after a 10-year battle with breast cancer, NASA said on its website this week. Read More » Scientists puzzle over Pluto's polygons  | By Irene Klotz NEW YORK (Reuters) - New pictures relayed by the first spacecraft to visit distant Pluto show odd polygon-shaped features and smooth hills in an crater-free plain, indications that the icy world is geologically active, New Horizons scientists said on Friday. "We had no idea that Pluto would have a geologically young surface," said lead researcher Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It's a wonderful surprise." The goal of the $720 million New Horizons mission is to map the surfaces of Pluto and its primary moon Charon, assess what materials they contain and study Pluto's atmosphere.
| Read More » Missing 'Vampire' Director's Skull: Why People Snatch Bodies  | The loss of the head of F.W. Murnau, the director of the 1922 silent vampire film "Nosferatu," has authorities flummoxed, though it's not the first time the director's tomb has been disturbed. Indeed, Murnau is hardly the only victim of body snatching. Until the mid-1800s and into the early 1900s, doctors experiencing a shortage of anatomical specimens often engaged in shady deals with "resurrectionists." These resurrectionists made their money by selling purloined bodies, often snatched from fresh graves.
| Read More » Complex Cirrus Clouds Seen in 3D from Space  | The Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) on the ISS scans the planet with lasers and records the light that bounces back, according to NASA Earth Observatory. On April 2, CATS took measurements (seen at the bottom of the image) of the clouds over the South Pacific.
| Read More » Destroyed Iraqi Holy Sites Find New Life Online  | Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to bring part of Iraq's destroyed heritage back to life. Over the past few years the world has watched as the Islamic State has destroyed historical monuments and committed acts of genocide in Iraq and Syria. However, thanks to the Iraq travels of Amir Harrak, a professor at the University of Toronto, researchers have a chance to bring a bit of this destroyed heritage back online.
| Read More » Asteroid Mining Company's 1st Satellite Launches from Space Station  | A private spaceflight company took one small step for asteroid mining this week with the launch of its first spacecraft to test technology that may one day help tap into the riches of the solar system. The Arkyd 3 Reflight spacecraft, a small satellite built by the space-mining company Planetary Resources, launched from the International Space Station on Thursday (July 16), beginning a 90-day mission to test the avionics, control systems and software needed to make asteroid mining possible. Planetary Resources first tried to launch a version of the satellite into orbit last October, but that spacecraft was lost when the commercial Antares rocket carrying it and supplies for the space station exploded shortly after liftoff.
| Read More » Nix Pix Sizes Up Pluto's Middle Child Moon  | The middle child of Pluto's moon family, Nix, has been given its close up by the New Horizons space probe. The first close-up image of Nix snapped by the New Horizons probe seems a little fuzzy compared with the stunning photos of Pluto and Charon, but that's because Nix is only 25 miles (40 kilometers) wide — and, in fact, the measurement of its diameter is one of the major pieces of information that the spacecraft science team has managed to glean from the new portraits of the satellite. While the new image may appear to be rather low resolution, past observations of Nix have shown little more than a speck of light around Pluto.
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