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Press Conferences

March 14, 2023
NASA’s New Horizons Team Discusses Discoveries from the Kuiper Belt

February 13, 2020
Discovering How Planetary Building Blocks Form

March 18, 2019
Revealing the First Primordial Planetesimal

January 3, 2019
The Ultima Thule Flyby

January 2, 2019
First Results

January 1, 2019
Spacecraft status, latest images and data download schedule

December 31, 2018
New Horizons Spacecraft Homing in on Kuiper Belt Target

October 24, 2018
New Horizons Team Previews Ultima Thule Flyby
American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting

December 12, 2017
New Horizons Explores the Kuiper Belt
American Geophysical Union (AGU) Meeting

October 18, 2016
NASA's New Horizons Mission: Discoveries on Pluto and Worlds Beyond
AAS Division for Planetary Sciences and European Planetary Science Congress

March 21, 2016
New Horizons: Peering into Pluto's Past
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

November 9, 2015
Science Results from the New Horizons Encounter with Pluto
47th Annual Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting

July 24, 2015
New Horizons Team Finds Haze, Flowing Ice on Pluto

April 29, 2015
NASA's New Horizons Detects Surface Features, Possible Polar Cap on Pluto

April 14, 2015
NASA's New Horizons Nears Historic Encounter with Pluto

April 29, 2015

NASA's New Horizons Detects Surface Features, Possible Polar Cap on Pluto

NASA Briefing


For the first time, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto – the primary target of the New Horizons close flyby in mid-July.

The images were captured in early to mid-April from within 70 million miles (113 million kilometers), using the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera on New Horizons. A technique called image deconvolution sharpens the raw, unprocessed images beamed back to Earth. New Horizons scientists interpreted the data to reveal the dwarf planet has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap.

“As we approach the Pluto system we are starting to see intriguing features such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole, starting the great scientific adventure to understand this enigmatic celestial object,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “As we get closer, the excitement is building in our quest to unravel the mysteries of Pluto using data from New Horizons.”

Briefing 1: Pluto Science and New Horizons

Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Image 2

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Image 3

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Image 4

Credit: Dr. Alex H. Parker

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Image 7

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Image 8

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Image 9

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Image 10

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Image 11

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Image 12

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Image 13

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Image 14

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Science

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