Universe Today
In July of 2015,
NASA's
mission made history when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a flyby of Pluto. Since that time, the spacecraft's mission was extended so it could make its way farther into the outer Solar System and become the first spacecraft to explore some Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). It's first objective will be the KBO known as 2014 MU69, which was
recently
given the nickname
"Ultima Thule"
("
ultima thoo-lee"
).
Earlier this month (on August 16th), the
New Horizons
spacecraft managed to
capture an image of Ultima Thule
for the first time using its
Long Range Reconnaissance Imager
(LORRI). This came as a bit of a surprise to the mission team, given that the object is still 172 million km (107 million mi) away and against a dense background of stars. At its current speed,
New Horizons
will rendezvous with the object on New Year's Day, 2019.
The image was the composite of 48 images taken by the team in their first attempt to find Ultima Thule. These images were transmitted back to Earth using NASA's Deep Space Network over the next few days. After subtracting the light of the background stars, they were able to see light reflected from Ultima Thule - a KBO which orbits our Sun at a distance of roughly 6.5 billion km (4 billion mi).
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Artist's impression of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69 (aka. Ultima Thule) on Jan. 1st, 2019. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Steve Gribben
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As Hal Weaver, the
New Horizons
project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
(JHUAPL), explained in a recent NASA
press release
:
This first detection is important because observations conducted by
New Horizons
over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course towards Ultima. It also indicated that the team already has a good idea of Ultima's orbit since the KBO was precisely where the mission scientists predicted it would be (using data gathered by the
Hubble Space Telescope
).
When the
New Horizons
mission reaches Ultima, it will be the first time any spacecraft has explored a small object in the Kuiper Belt and will also be the farthest exploration of any body in the Solar System in history.
New Horizons
already set that record back in July of 2015 when it made its flyby of Pluto, exceeding the previous record by about 1.6 billion km (1 billion mi).
[caption id="attachment_134988" align="aligncenter" width="468"]
Artist's impression of New Horizons' close encounter with the Pluto–Charon system. Credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI/Steve Gribben
[/caption]
Speaking of breaking records, these images also broke the previous two records for the most distant image ever taken. Back in
December of 2017
,
New Horizons
had already broken that record when it took pictures of the "Wishing Well" star cluster at a distance of 6.12 billion km (3.79 billion mi). This exceeded the record-setting "
Pale Blue Dot
" image taken by the
Voyager 1
probe in 1990 - at a distance of 6.06 billion km (3.75 billion mi).
As Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
declared
:
The New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to make its historic rendezvous with Ultima at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1st, 2019. The data it gathers on this KBO will also tell scientists a great deal about the formation and early history of the Solar System. Just four months to go, and we will be witnessing history in the making!
Further Reading: John Hopkins University, NASA
