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Only a week before its expected meeting with Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Ultima Thule on New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has not been able to detect the predictable and consistent variations in reflectivity — or ‘light curve' in the jargon of astronomers — that accompany all celestial objects in orbit near a bright star. "It's really a puzzle," agreed Alan Stern, NASA's New Horizons principal investigator, cited by Gizmodo. Southwest Research Institute mission scientist Marc Buie suggested that the rotational point of Ultima Thule could currently be aligned directly toward the NASA spacecraft as it approaches. From that...

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object. The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto. Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the...

Don't sleep on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The history-making probe, which famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, is closing in on its next flyby target, a frigid chunk of ice and rock about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth dubbed Ultima Thule.  New Horizons is now just 80 million miles (130 million km) from Ultima Thule, mission members said Wednesday (Sept. 19). That's less than the distance from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles). [Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]  The spacecraft has already begun photographing Ultima Thule for navigation purposes and remains...

On the Saturday afternoon of July 4, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons Pluto mission leader Alan Stern was in his office near the project Mission Control Center, working, when his cell phone rang. He was aware of the Independence Day holiday but was much more focused on the fact that the date was “Pluto flyby minus 10 days.”... Glancing at his ringing phone, Alan was surprised to see the caller was Glen Fountain, the longtime project manager of New Horizons. He felt a chill because he knew that Glen was taking time off for the holiday, at his nearby home, before...