Three and a half years after giving humanity its first close-up view of Pluto, and almost 13 years after launching from Earth, the New Horizons spacecraft will explore another new frontier: a reddish hunk of rock and ice known as Ultima Thule.
The object—or, perhaps, pair of objects (it’s so far away astronomers aren’t sure) – is thought to be a pristine remnant of the early solar system, untouched for billions of years. Its nickname conveys its significance, meaning “beyond the known world.”
Ultima Thule is 4 billion miles from Earth. New Horizons will reach it as the new year arrives on Jan. 1, with a mission to collect as many images and as much data as possible while speeding past at 32,000 miles per hour. “This is pure exploration,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “We are really flying toward something completely unknown, unlike any other object we’ve studied in the past.”
The Ultima Thule fly-by is an encore for the New Horizons mission, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The baby grand piano-sized spacecraft designed and managed for NASA on the lab’s Laurel, Md., campus zipped past Pluto—its primary mission—in July 2015, revealing craggy, icy surfaces and a wisp of an atmosphere around the dwarf planet.
It will capture similar images and data as it passes even closer to Ultima Thule, itself just about 20 miles across. But even though it’s technically an add-on phase of a mission whose main focus was Pluto, the examination of Ultima Thule could prove even more revelatory. “It could potentially be the most primitive object ever encountered by a spacecraft,” said Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist. “By examining what it looks like now, we are looking back at the time of planetary formation.”
Ultima Thule is in a region at the edge of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt. Scientists suspect the region is home to hundreds of thousands of asteroid- or cometlike objects at least as big as Ultima Thule—which is officially known as 2014 MU69.
At such a distance, the sun provides barely a glint of light, yet its influence is still felt—Ultima Thule is among a group of Kuiper Belt objects that orbit the distant star in almost a perfect circle, instead of an ellipse like most planetary objects. That suggests it has avoided any major collisions in the 4.6 billion years since the solar system formed.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-pluto-horizons-mission-nears-world.htmljCp
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