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All Eyes on the Ice Giants
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NASA’s New Horizons Reaches a Rare
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2 years ago
All Eyes on the Ice Giants
NASA’s New Horizons Team Calls for the Amateur Astronomical Community to
Augment the Mission’s Observations of Uranus and Neptune 
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus and Neptune from
its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and the mission team is
inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come along for the ride –
and make a real contribution to space science – by observing both ice giants at
the same time. 

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Amateur astronomers have supported outer planet observing
conducts-the-first-interstellar-parallax- campaigns before, producing useful data. This GIF animation
experiment) from images taken by Marc Delcroix and François Colas at the
Pic du Midi telescope in the French Pyrénées, shows movement
New Horizons Team Uncovers a Critical of the bright spot as Uranus rotated over two hours on Oct. 4,
Piece of the Planetary Formation Puzzle 2014.
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3 years ago
()

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Far, Far Away in the Sky: New Horizons

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8/12/23, 10:31 AM All Eyes on the Ice Giants | NASA
y y

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low.jpg)
Images of Uranus (below) taken by Anthony Wesley of
Murrumbateman, Australia with a 16″ Newtonian telescope with a
650-850nm filter and PGR GS3-U3-23S6M camera, show the
dramatic appearance of a bright storm on a planet that normally
displays only a diffuse bright polar region.
Credits: Anthony Wesley

In September – in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope – New Horizons

will turn its color camera toward Uranus and Neptune. From New Horizons’
position in the Kuiper Belt, more than 5 billion miles from Earth, these unique
images acquired from “behind” the two giant planets will provide new insights
into the atmospheres above and the energy balance within both worlds. 

“By combining the information New Horizons collects in space with data from
telescopes on Earth, we can supplement and even strengthen our models to
uncover the mysteries swirling in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune,”
said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest
Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Even from amateur astronomer
telescopes as small as 16 inches, these complementary observations can be
extremely important.”

With New Horizons and Hubble focused on the details of the planets'
atmospheres and the transfer of heat from their rocky cores through their
gaseous exteriors, observers on Earth can measure the distribution of bright
features on Uranus or characterize any unusually bright features on Neptune.
They can also track those features much longer than either spacecraft. 

Following the campaign, observers can post their images – as well as the
details of when they were made and in what filter passbands -- on X (formerly
Twitter) or Facebook using the hashtag #NHIceGiants. The New Horizons
team will see and collect the images and supporting information placed on
these platforms using this identifying hashtag.  

Full details on the campaign – including finder charts and observation tables –
are available on the New Horizons website at (URL to come). 

The Hubble images of Uranus and Neptune will be made publicly available in
late September on the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at
archive.stsci.edu.  The New Horizons team expects to receive the images of
Uranus and Neptune from the spacecraft by the end of 2023 and will make
them available as well.

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8/12/23, 10:31 AM All Eyes on the Ice Giants | NASA
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed,
built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, in San
Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator
Alan Stern, and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter
science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed
by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow New Horizons on its incredible voyage at

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons (http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons) and
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu).

Last Updated: Aug 11, 2023

Editor: Tricia Talbert

Tags:  Kuiper Belt (/subject/3151/kuiper-belt), New Horizons

(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html), Planets
(/subject/6960/planets), Solar System (/topics/solarsystem/index.html)

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