With New Horizons scheduled for its flyby of Pluto/Charon in a matter of weeks and a Kuiper Belt extended mission to follow, it’s interesting to note a new paper on objects well beyond Pluto’s orbit. Lucie Jílková (Leiden Observatory) and colleagues address the problem of Sedna and recently discovered 2012VP113. The problem they present is that even at their closest approach to the Sun, these two objects are outside the Kuiper Belt, while their aphelion distances are too short for them to be considered members of the Oort Cloud. So where do Sedna and 2012VP113 belong in our taxonomy of the Solar System? Thirteen such objects have now been discovered, a group collectively referred to as Sednitos. These objects have orbital elements in common: A large semi-major axis (with perihelion beyond 30 AU and aphelion beyond 150 AU), a common orbital inclination, and a similar argument of perihelion. A common origin seems likely. Jílková’s team is interested in the possibility that Sedna and...

An abrupt change: I'm holding today's post (about halfway done, on a stellar flyby that may have produced Sedna and other such objects long in our system's past) to turn to New Horizons' latest imagery, which is provocative indeed. We'll cover the Sedna story tomorrow. What we have from New Horizons is the work of the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) in a series of images that show Pluto and its largest moon Charon as they more than double in size between May 29 and June 19. There's plenty here to marvel at, but what stands out for me is the mysterious dark region that NASA's latest release refers to as 'a kind of anti-polar cap' on Charon. Have a look: Image: These recent images show the discovery of significant surface details on Pluto's largest moon, Charon. They were taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on June 18, 2015. The image on the left is the original image, displayed at four times the native LORRI image size. After...

It's hard to consider a place with surface temperatures of -180°C 'Earthlike,' but there are reasons why we see the term so often applied to Titan. The most striking of these is the presence of surface lakes and seas, a phenomenon found nowhere else in the Solar System. The temperatures are cold enough to make the circulating fluid liquid methane and ethane rather than water, but we see things in Cassini imagery that are strikingly familiar, including seas fed by river-like channels and large numbers of shallow lakes that appear in flatter areas. The European Space Agency's Thomas Cornet has been leading a team investigating Titan's surface features in greater detail. In particular, the lakes of Titan do not appear to be fed by rivers, making it likely that they are filled either by rainfall or by liquids welling up from below. Empty depressions can be found where lakes may once have been, and it is believed that some of the lakes dry out during Titan's thirty-year cycle of...

New imagery from New Horizons continues to dazzle, with the images below taken by the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from May 29 to June 2. We're beginning to pick up bright areas mixed with dark terrain in what are clearly the best images ever obtained of the remote world. As before, mission scientists are using deconvolution to sharpen the raw images and are also teasing out further details with contrast adjustments. The processing can produce artifacts so that fine details will have to be checked at closer range. Image: These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different "faces" of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left. From left to right, the images were taken when Pluto's central longitude was 17, 63, 130, and 243...

I know I'm going to remember the summer of 2015 for a long time. The confluence of deep space missions has brought new images every week, including the latest view of Ceres and its enigmatic bright spots, which appears below. I'm already bracing myself for that Voyager-like sense of deflation once New Horizons gets past Pluto/Charon and the long-anticipated targets dwindle. Pluto has a special place for some of us because we grew up with it being considered the ninth planet. Dwarf planet or not, it's the final act of a classic Solar System tour. Not that we won't be returning to many of these places, but the timing is uncertain and once Juno finishes its work at Jupiter, we'll have no missions on their way to the outer planets. That makes this summer both energizing and a bit poignant, but let's enjoy it while we can. This view of Ceres, taken on June 6, really is spectacular. We're seeing the dwarf planet from 4400 kilometers as Dawn flies its second mapping orbit. The resolution is...