5 January 2015Pillars of Creation RevisitedPaul Scowen
Scowen helps lead new Hubble visible and infrared imaging of the Pillars of Creation, revealing finer structure and embedded stars.
Historical records for United States of America in 2015, rendered directly from the World History Database and ordered by month, day and event.
Scowen helps lead new Hubble visible and infrared imaging of the Pillars of Creation, revealing finer structure and embedded stars.
New Horizons begins its formal approach phase toward Pluto after nearly nine years of interplanetary flight.
Receives a Best Picture nomination as producer of American Sniper.
A 93-second thruster burn adjusts New Horizons' trajectory for the forthcoming Pluto encounter.
New Horizons becomes closer to Pluto than Earth is to the Sun, marking a major approach milestone.
Detailed MESSENGER imagery of Zeami basin shows extensive fields of Mercury's distinctive bright hollows.
Approach images begin showing distinct surface features on Pluto with steadily improving detail.
MESSENGER ends its mission by impacting Mercury after completing 4,105 orbits and transforming knowledge of the planet.
Mission controllers receive MESSENGER's final telemetry before the spacecraft impacts Mercury after more than four years in orbit.
New Horizons photographs Kerberos and Styx for the first time, bringing all five known Pluto moons into spacecraft view.
A final 23-second engine burn fine-tunes New Horizons' trajectory toward its Pluto flyby.
After a detailed hazard search, the mission team keeps New Horizons on its planned Pluto flyby trajectory.
New Horizons' Ralph spectrometer detects frozen methane on Pluto during approach, confirming the molecule from spacecraft observations.
New Horizons enters safe mode because of a spacecraft command-sequence timing problem days before the Pluto encounter.
New Horizons returns to normal science operations after recovery from the July 4 safe-mode event.
New Horizons measurements determine Pluto is about 2,370 kilometres in diameter, larger than many pre-encounter estimates.
New Horizons returns its last and most detailed full-disk image of Pluto before closest approach.
New Horizons completes humanity's first close flyby of Pluto and its system of moons.
During a solar occultation, New Horizons probes Pluto's atmosphere far above levels previously measured from Earth.
A radio occultation experiment obtains the first direct measurement of atmospheric pressure at Pluto's surface.
New Horizons images show Charon as a geologically varied world with enormous canyons and contrasting terrains.
Close-up images reveal youthful water-ice mountains rising about 3.5 kilometres above Pluto's surface.
New Horizons data show Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere extending to roughly 1,600 kilometres above the surface.
Images reveal a vast craterless plain in Pluto's heart-shaped region, indicating surprisingly young terrain.
The newly revealed icy plain in Pluto's heart is informally named Sputnik Planum, later standardized as Sputnik Planitia.
Mission scientists conclude that nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices can flow across Pluto at its extremely low temperatures.
New Horizons images show nitrogen-rich ices flowing across Pluto in glacier-like patterns, evidence of recent geologic activity.
Backlit New Horizons images reveal multiple atmospheric haze layers extending far above Pluto.
New Horizons detects ethylene and acetylene in Pluto's atmosphere, compounds involved in forming its complex haze particles.
New Horizons finds Pluto's atmospheric surface pressure lower than estimates derived from earlier Earth-based observations.
New Horizons results prompt investigation of how Pluto replenishes atmospheric nitrogen while gas escapes to space.
Thornes black hole and gravitational wave theory helps interpret the first LIGO detection
Weiss sees the interferometer concept vindicated when LIGO detects gravitational waves from merging black holes
A New Horizons methane map shows that methane ice is distributed unevenly across Pluto's surface.
Enhanced-color imagery reveals the unusual ridged and scaly terrain of Tartarus Dorsa, nicknamed Pluto's snakeskin terrain.
High-resolution New Horizons images reveal rugged mountains, faulted blocks and detailed textures along the edge of Sputnik Planitia.
New Horizons observations reveal that Pluto's small moons are irregular bodies with unexpectedly complex rotational behaviour.
New Horizons compositional mapping identifies numerous exposed regions of water ice on Pluto's surface.
Color observations show that Pluto's high-altitude atmospheric haze appears blue when viewed in scattered sunlight.
Announces he will not run for president in 2016.
New Horizons obtains its first distant spacecraft observations of Kuiper Belt object 1994 JR1.
Topographic analysis identifies Wright Mons and Piccard Mons as possible large cryovolcanoes formed by icy volcanic activity.
The New Horizons team reports more than fifty Pluto-system discoveries four months after the flyby as stored data continue reaching Earth.
Analysis of the small moons shows rapid, non-synchronous rotation rather than the simple tidal locking seen in Pluto and Charon.
Highest-resolution images show erosion and faulting sculpting rugged badlands and a major canyon system in Pluto's northern terrain.
Close-up imagery reveals aligned pits in Pluto's nitrogen-rich ice, probably formed through fracturing and volatile-ice loss.
Kelly helps predict and then identify the reappearance of gravitationally lensed Supernova Refsdal in Hubble images.
The New Horizons team selects 2014 MU69 as the preferred Kuiper Belt object for the spacecraft's post-Pluto flyby.
New Horizons performs a sequence of course corrections that redirects the spacecraft toward the selected Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.
MESSENGER conducts an exceptionally low-altitude final campaign, obtaining measurements from only tens of kilometres above Mercury.
Co-writes and stars in Mistress America, a comedy about friendship, ambition and reinvention.
Wong helps track bright companion clouds associated with a developing dark vortex on Neptune.
The Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy programme begins annual global monitoring of Neptune's changing weather.
Shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
New Horizons detects Pluto's moon Nix during approach, adding another small satellite to its own imaging record.
Plays Major Marquis Warren in Quentin Tarantino's western The Hateful Eight.
Plays frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant, enduring a physically demanding wilderness role.
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