NASA’s New Horizons Space Probe to Do Flyby of Ultima Thule
By Lora Snow
December 31, 2018
After the Ball Drops at Midnight in Times Square tonight, tune in to NASA Television here - https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#public for an even bigger event; NASA’s New Horizons space probe is going to do a flyby of a distant planetesimal and NASA is going to air it live.
The planetesimal (What a fun word!) is nicknamed Ultima Thule, a Latin phrase meaning a place beyond the known world. Its official name is 2014 MU69. Its located in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region encircling Neptune’s orbit that includes Pluto and other dwarf planets, planetesimals, and comets.
Kuiper Belt. Credit: NASA
No spacecraft has ever explored such a distant world, according to a statement by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
New Horizons, which was launched on January 19, 2006, is expected to reach its closest point to Ultima Thule at 12:33 A.M. EST. At this time, it is expected to be just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) from its surface.
The space probe will be mapping it on its way towards it and after it passes the planet and is expected to gather a lot of information about the planet such as its surface features, any moons it might have, information about its atmosphere if it has one and more.
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