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21 July 2010
Comet Whacked Neptune 230 Years Ago
Researchers studying Neptune's atmosphere found evidence that a comet may have hit the planet about two centuries ago. Was this a "cold-case" file re-opened, or did they discover a way to travel back in time to witness a long-ago event? To make the discovery, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research [...]
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07 April 2010
40 Years of Summer on Triton
If you're planning a trip to Neptune's moon Triton, you'll want to head to the southern hemisphere where it's now just past mid-summer. Yes, distant Triton actually does have seasons, astronomers at ESO's Very Large Telescope recently determined. "We have found real evidence that the Sun still makes its presence felt on Triton, [...]
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12 March 2009
New Horizons Spots Neptune's Moon Triton
New Horizons got a great shot of Neptune's moon Triton last fall, as it was trucking toward Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.  The mission was 2.33 billion miles (3.75 billion kilometers) from Neptune on Oct. 16, when its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) locked onto the planet and snapped away. The craft was following a programmed sequence of [...]
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12 September 2008
Pluto Spacecraft Gets Brain Transplant
Still seven years away from its rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken from hibernation for the second annual checkout of all systems. The spacecraft and its team back on Earth will also undergo three months of operations as the New Horizons will make observations of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But [...]
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27 November 2007
How Old is Triton's Surface?
With all of the press going to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it's about time that Neptune got a turn. Triton – one of the moons of Neptune – is curious, with large swaths of the planet resembling the skin of a cantaloupe and a retrograde orbit (opposite that of Neptune's rotation). Its surface [...]
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21 November 2007
Podcast: Neptune
We’ve reached Neptune, the final planet in our tour through the solar system – but don’t worry! The tour’s not over, but after this week we’ll be all out of planets. Neptune has a controversial story about its discovery, some of the strongest winds in the solar system and some weird moons. Click here to download [...]
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18 September 2007
Neptune's South Pole is the Warmest Place on the Planet
Here on Earth we think of the poles as cold places, but on Neptune, it's just the opposite. New images of the planet's southern pole show that it's actually 10-degrees warmer than the rest of Neptune. Now don't pack your bathing suit just yet, Neptune's average temperature is still -200 degrees Celsius (-328 F); so [...]
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