New Horizons Interview with Dennis Reuter

Dr. Leila Mays explains a space weather model that depicts conditions experienced by the New Horizons mission. Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.0 Enlil model of the New Horizons mission's space weather conditions. Credit: NASA/Dusan Odstrcil A few months before New Horizons was due to reach Pluto, a community of scientists came together to determine just what kind of a environment the mission would experience during its historic flyby. While the simulations aren't 100% conclusive, this first ever attempt to characterize space weather conditions so far from our own home opens the door to better protecting our spacecraft – and eventually humans -- as we continue to explore the solar system and beyond. To attempt to map what surges of particles are passing by Pluto, the Community Coordinated Modeling Center, or CCMC, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sought input from space weather scientists around the nation. The CCMC houses numerous software models to help scientists with their research and also to enable improved space weather forecasting. Related pages

A NASA spacecraft closes in on an unexplored neighborhood at the outskirts of the solar system. Watch this video to find out what New Horizons hopes to see when it arrives at Pluto in 2015. Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix and Hydra are seen in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. New Horizons carries seven scientific instruments and weighs 1,060 pounds. New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. For More InformationSee [Science@NASA](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/03dec_newhorizons/) Related pages

Short video about the Kuiper Belt and the new supercomputer model of its evolution.For complete transcript, click here. Super computer simulation of Kuiper belt with dates. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Marc Kuchner and Christopher Stark Super computer simulation of Kuiper belt without dates. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Marc Kuchner and Christopher Stark These images, produced by computer models that track the movement of icy grains, represent infrared snapshots of Kuiper Belt dust as seen by a distant observer. For the first time, the models include the effects of collisions among grains. By ramping up the collision rate, the simulations show how the distant view of the solar system might have changed over its history. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Marc Kuchner and Christopher Stark These images, produced by computer models that track the movement of icy grains, represent infrared snapshots of Kuiper Belt dust as seen by a distant observer. For the first time, the models include the effects of collisions among grains. By ramping up the collision rate, the simulations show how the distant view of the solar system might have changed over its history. No Labels. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Marc Kuchner and Christopher Stark Simulated images of the ancient Kuiper Belt bear a striking resemblance to this Hubble Space Telescope view of the dusty ring around Fomalhaut, a young star located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. In 2008, Hubble spotted a planet orbiting inside the ring. The bright central star is masked out so that the faint ring can be seen. Credit: NASA/ESA/P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (Univ. of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Dust ground off icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the cold-storage zone that includes Pluto and millions of other objects, creates a faint infrared disk potentially visible to alien astronomers looking for planets around the sun. Neptune's gravitational imprint on the dust is always detectable in new simulations of how this dust moves through the solar system. By ramping up the collision rate, the simulations show how the distant view of the solar system might have changed over its history. More here. For More InformationSee [http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dust-model.html](http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dust-model.html) Related pages