Kuiper Belt

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year's 2019 close encounter.

As NASA’s New Horizons mission continues exploring the unknown, the mission team has selected a highly appropriate nickname for its next flyby target in the outer reaches of the solar system.

In this episode of Gravity Assist, Jim Green talks with New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern about what we’ve learned about Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 and the remarkable story of how -- against all odds -- the New Horizons team captured MU69’s fleeting shadow on Earth as the object passed in front of a distant star.

In just under a year – shortly after midnight Eastern Time on Jan. 1, 2019 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will buzz by the most primitive and most distant object ever explored.

2014 MU69 may have a companion: a small moon.

Billions of kilometers from Earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune, lies perhaps the most forbidding part of our solar system, a vast realm so cold and dark it sparks a frisson of dread among thoughtful astronauts.

Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory have discovered an icy planetary body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt roughly equal in size to Pluto's moon Charon.