We’re joining forces with our colleagues at Spaceflight Now to provide live coverage of the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of 2014 MU69 — also known as Ultima Thule — in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
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Pluto’s icy ‘spider’
Sprawling across Pluto’s icy landscape is an unusual geological feature that resembles a giant spider. This enhanced colour image, obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on 14 July 2015, consists of at least six extensional fractures (arrowed) converging to a point near the centre. Curiously, the spider’s “legs” expose red deposits below Pluto’s surface.
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First close up Juno images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot reach Earth
Two days after NASA’s Juno spacecraft streaked over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, pictures of the solar system’s largest, most powerful storm, have been transmitted to Earth, giving eager scientist close-up views of the 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone where 400-mph winds have been howling for at least 187 years and possibly much longer.
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LISA Pathfinder success paves way for space-based gravitational wave detection
LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by the European Space Agency with contributions from NASA, has successfully tested key technology needed to build a space-based observatory for detecting gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in the fabric of space, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, were first seen last year by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).