James Webb Space Telescope will study icy objects in the mysterious ‘graveyard of the solar system’

Pluto may no longer be a planet, but the dwarf planet and its icy neighbors in the Kuiper Belt are about to enter the spotlight. One of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first missions this year will be a program to study Pluto and some of the thousands of other celestial objects in the Kuiper … Read more

Features on icy ‘space snowman’ Arrokoth receive names

The map of a distant, lobe-shaped object called Arrokoth (2014 MU69) now has official names to accompany the images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. After the spacecraft zoomed by the lobe-shaped world in 2019, managers of the mission — most famous for its flyby of Pluto four years before — announced the proposed feature names … Read more

Scientists spot another crater on dwarf planet Ceres that may mark an icy volcano

Ceres might be spewing cryovolcanoes in yet another spot on the dwarf planet’s surface. Close-up pictures from NASA’s Dawn mission that orbited Ceres between 2015 and 2018 revealed salt deposits in a crater known as Urvara, spotted for the first time in a new study. The salt deposits may be associated with icy volcanoes, the … Read more