NASA's Pluto Spacecraft Begins New Mission at the Solar System's Edge

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December 22, 2022

Dear Reader, This week, we're thinking about new beginnings. Our lead story previews the next phase of life for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which in March 2023 will emerge from hibernation past Pluto, in the depths of the Kuiper belt. In addition to observing the distant clouds of Neptune and Uranus, the spacecraft will also be seeking out another Kuiper belt object for a potential rendezvous, and may even turn its cameras back toward Earth to attempt to see our world as a pale blue dot from the solar system's edge. Elsewhere, we have stories about the origins of cosmic neutrinos, the six times quantum physics blew our minds in 2022, and more. This is the last space & physics newsletter for the year. The winter holidays are underway, and most of us at Scientific American (yours truly included) are winding down for a much-needed break. Please enjoy this special time with your friends and family, stay safe—and, of course, keep looking up. We'll see you bright and early in 2023.

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Space Exploration NASA's Pluto Spacecraft Begins New Mission at the Solar System's Edge New Horizons is about to wake up and study the Kuiper Belt, the universe and even Uranus and Neptune. But a new target to visit could trump them all By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Quantum Physics 6 Times Quantum Physics Blew Our Minds in 2022 Quantum telepathy, laser-based time crystals, a glow from empty space and an "unreal" universe—these are the most awesome (and awfully hard to understand) results from the subatomic realm we encountered in 2022 By Lee Billings

Black Holes Neutrinos from a Nearby Galaxy Reveal Black Hole Secrets The IceCube observatory has detected neutrinos from an active galaxy for the first time, revealing clues about how supermassive black holes gobble matter By Phil Plait

Sponsor Content Provided by Battelle Climate Resilience: Impactful Innovation is Needed Today What's most needed right now are outcome-driven, scientific approaches committed to delivering breakthrough technologies and capabilities—ones that leverage the fundamental knowledge of the past and apply it in new mission-driven methods that reach beyond what is possible today.

Ecology How the Moon Devastated a Mangrove Forest In 2015 the moon's wobble and an El Niño teamed up to kill off tens of millions of Australian mangroves By Joanna Thompson

Artificial Intelligence AI Platforms like ChatGPT Are Easy to Use but Also Potentially Dangerous Systems like ChatGPT are enormously entertaining and even mind-bogglingly human-sounding, but they are also unreliable and could create an avalanche of misinformation By Gary Marcus

Astronomy The Best of JWST's Cosmic Portraits These new views of familiar space sights reveal details never before seen By Clara Moskowitz

Space Exploration Keep Looking Up As a dismal year on Earth draws to a close, milestones in space exploration offer much for the whole world to celebrate By The Editors

Artificial Intelligence 10 Ways AI Was Used for Good This Year Artificial intelligence can improve health, protect biodiversity and even write wine reviews By Sophie Bushwick

FROM THE STORE Special Editions Volume 31, Issue 6s

QUOTE OF THE DAY "It takes a long time to get to where our spacecraft is. When you have a spacecraft that is out in that part of the solar system, it is a huge asset to the scientific community. There are so many unique things that a spacecraft that is out that far can do. We definitely want to take advantage of that." Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland

FROM THE ARCHIVE Pluto's Wonders Come into Focus NASA's New Horizons mission has delivered a treasure trove of data from the dwarf planet By Lee Billings | March 2016

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