New Horizons’ close flyby of Ultima Thule on 1 January 2019
New Horizons’ close flyby of Ultima Thule on 1 January 2019
In 61 years of space exploration, no spacecraft has examined an object further away from the Earth and Sun at close quarters: on 1 January 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly past the approximately 30-kilometre trans-Neptunian object, 2014 MU69, which is 6.5 billion kilometres from the Sun. The body has been given the provisional name Ultima Thule by the project scientists. Ultima Thule is an object in the Kuiper-Edgeworth belt. New Horizons – in front of the Sun (upper right corner) in this artist’s impression – will pass Ultima Thule at a distance of just 3500 kilometres. It takes a signal from New Horizons over six hours to reach Earth (one way).
