NASA’s New Horizons Passes Space Rock in Kuiper Belt

NASA’s New Horizons explorer passed the object Ultima Thule on New Year’s Eve, a space rock located 1.6 billion kilometers from Pluto that could provide information about the formation of planets.

The New Horizons flyby marks an encounter with the most distant space object yet by humans. NASA had ordered the explorer to point its cameras and sensors at Ultima Thule and is awaiting the first signals at the time of writing. Because of the distance, it takes ten hours for those signals to reach Earth.

Ultima Thule, or 2014 MU69, was discovered in 2014 with the help of the Hubble telescope and is located 4 billion kilometers from Earth in the so-called Kuiper Belt, the belt of billions of rocks and ice objects surrounding the solar system. Its size is estimated at 19 to 32 kilometers in diameter. Research on these objects may tell scientists more about the formation of planets and the conditions in which the solar system formed.

On Sunday, NASA already published an image of Ultima Thule, which shows that it is probably an elongated object. That photo was taken 1.2 million miles away. As it passed, New Horizons took more than six hundred photos that should provide more clarity about the object’s shape.

The mission is considerably more difficult than passing Pluto in 2015, due to its smaller size and the short time in which Ultima Thule’s existence is known. In fact, New Horizons may have pointed its instruments at an empty space as it flew past. NASA will be holding several live broadcasts in the coming days to announce the progress.