021 - Pursuing New Horizons

The Skyentists

In this episode our Skyentists, Ángel López-Sánchez and Kirsten Banks, describe NASA's New Horizons spacecraft: the first mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt, in the outskirts of our Solar System. They summarize the main objectives of the mission, the instruments on board of New Horizons, and the results that this small spaceship has provided so far. These include amazing surprises in Pluto and Charon (Pluto's largest moon) and the recent flyby of the transneptunian object 2014 MU69 (unofficially also known as "Ultima Thule") early this year. For "Space News" Kirsten hopes that the next (and last) attempt of re-connecting with the Mars rover Opportunity ("Oppy") are successful. Ángel summarizes a new research from some colleagues at the Canary Islands Institute for Astrophysics (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain) who have reprocessed the data of the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, resulting in the image now revealing the external parts of many distant galaxies. For feedback we provide our "Top-10" list of objects for amateur astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere. Our object for "What's Up" for this episode is the famous globular cluster 47 Tucanae.