Psychedelic Pluto

NASA officials expect to officially kick off development in February of a multibillion-dollar observatory recycling a grounded top secret spy satellite telescope capable of studying dark energy and directly resolving planets around other stars.

Scientists planning the the next phase of NASA’s New Horizons mission, a robotic craft that completed the first exploration of Pluto in 2015, are going into the flyby of a frozen, faraway city-sized clump of rock on New Year’s Day 2019 armed with little knowledge of the target lurking around 4 billion miles from Earth.

After months of troubleshooting, engineers say the InSight Mars lander’s German temperature probe has resumed its hammering into the martian surface.