3Q: On the significance of Ultima Thule
After nearly 20 years of planning and 13 years of flight, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft traveled nearly 6.5 billion kilometers from Earth — the farthest distance yet for a space mission encounter— to visit the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system. In July 2015, the spacecraft approached Pluto, returning extraordinary images and data about the dwarf planet and its moons. Shortly after, the trans-Neptunian object Ultima Thule — whose name means “beyond the known world,” for it is located 1.6 billion kilometers out from Pluto — was selected as the next object of interest. At its closest approach on Jan. 1, the New Horizons probe passed within 3,500 km of 2014 MU69, better known as Ultima Thule, and began transmitting data back to Earth, a process that will take nearly two years to complete. This is the first mission of its kind to explore this region in...