Spacecraft

Steel strut holding down a bottle of high-pressure helium snapped during ascent, though Dragon capsule would have survived if not for software glitch

“Sputnik Planum” region is a vast stretch of icy plains whose surface is broken into cell-like polygon blocks by snaking troughs

China’s current rank of eighth in the space race is misleading. The nation’s engineers are drawing up plans for a moon-capable rocket more powerful than the U.S.’s Saturn 5

Lack of impact craters suggests the dwarf planet may be geologically active

NASA chooses astronauts to fly on commercial missions

New Horizons mission members have worked on the project for longer than it took the spacecraft to get to Pluto

High-resolution images of the icy worlds reveal towering mountains, yawning canyons and perhaps hints of a subsurface ocean

Although we've only just begun to see the scientific return from NASA's New Horizons mission and its close encounter with the Pluto–Charon system, this has been an unexpectedly profound human endeavor

Even if the decade-old flyby spacecraft could have used higher frequency microwaves to return data, large improvements might not have followed

Though the dwarf planet is now behind it, the spacecraft’s science returns are only just beginning

At just before 7:50 A.M. today, July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto. After a 9.5-year, three-billion-mile voyage, the ship got within about 7,750 miles from the surface

Images from the New Horizons probe’s journey to the distant reaches of the solar system