NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute
HAPPY BELATED NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!! In case you're wondering why I didn't post a Blog entry on January 1st itself, it's because I wanted to start 2019 off with these amazing photos that were just released of 2014 MU69 (a.k.a. Ultima Thule)...which was briefly visited by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft over a half-hour after midnight on New Year's Day. Now 4 billion miles from Earth, New Horizons flew past this 22-mile-long Kuiper Belt object (KBO) at 12:33 AM, Eastern Standard Time on January 1 (9:33 PM, Pacific Standard Time on December 31)—making this the most distant object to ever be explored by a spacecraft.
NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute
Since it takes over 6 hours for New Horizons to transmit its Ultima Thule data at the speed of light back to Earth, a total of 20 months will be required for all of the information gathered at this KBO to be beamed to our home planet. By the time the data transfer is completed next year, the New Horizons team will probably have submitted another proposal to NASA to explore a second KBO sometime in the 2020s. Ultima Thule was barely detected even using the full capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)—so it would remain to be seen if HST will be powerful enough to find another KBO (even farther from Earth than 2014 MU69 is) for New Horizons to reconnoiter. Let's hope that Hubble is powerful enough...or that the James Webb Space Telescope (which would easily detect KBOs beyond Ultima Thule's orbit) doesn't suffer another friggin' launch delay.
Adrian Mann / All About Space
I would also like to point out that NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft officially entered orbit around asteroid Bennu on New Year's Eve (the probe arrived at the Near-Earth object on December 3). Congrats to this mission's team for the major milestone! And happy Hump Day, everyone.
ABOVE: The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of 9:00 PM,
Pacific Standard Time, on January 2, 2019. It is 4.1 billion miles from Earth. Click here to view the
official webpage showing where New Horizons is in space. (AU stands for Astronomical Units, in case you're wondering.)
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