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Ultima Thule, the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft, has been officially renamed Arrokoth, or "sky" in the Native American Powhatan and Algonquian languages, following a significant backlash over the old name's Nazi connotations. The icy rock, which orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt about a billion miles beyond Pluto, was visited by the NASA spaceship New Horizons in January this year, with the first detailed images showing it consisted of two spheres stuck together in the shape of a snowman. Its technical designation is 2014 MU69 but the New Horizon team initially nicknamed it Ultima...

A new set of images showing the New Horizons spacecraft departing from Ultima Thule following its New Year’s Day closest approach reveals the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) is shaped less like a snowman and more like a flat object, with one lobe looking like a pancake and the other like a dented walnut. Initial images returned immediately after the flyby suggested the double-lobed object was composed of two nearly-spherical lobes, one larger than the other. Their apparent nearly round shapes were not due to the lobes being rounded by their own gravity, as both are far too small to attain...

"The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top," according to the APL release. "These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. "Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as 'collapse pits' or the ancient venting of volatile materials." The two lobes show "intriguing light and dark patterns of unknown origin, which may reveal...

The most distant object humanity has ever visited looks something like a spinning snowman or hourglass that’s lost in space.Researchers who work on NASA’s nuclear-powered New Horizons mission released a movie on Tuesday showing the rotation of the mountain-size rock, which is known formally as (486958) 2014 MU69.(It’s more commonly referred to as “Ultima Thule”.)Mu69 is about 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometres) from Earth and 1 billion miles (2 billion kilometres) beyond Pluto.New Horizons flew by the object on New Year’s Day at a speed of 32,200 miles per hour (52,000 kilometres per hour), and came within about 2,200 miles...

Humanity has captured its first clear look at an object in the faraway Kuiper Belt. NASA revealed the first images and science data from this week's historic flyby in a news conference Wednesday afternoon. Far from the blurry 'bowling pin' we saw with New Horizons' first look when it beamed its signal home early morning on January 1, the new images reveal Ultima Thule is snowman-shaped red world with two distinct lobes - one stacked atop the other. This arrangement is what's known as a contact binary, the experts say – and, it’s now the first a spacecraft has...

New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass. It will now send these home over the coming months. The radio message from the robotic craft was picked up by one of Nasa's big antennas, in Madrid, Spain. It had taken fully six hours and eight minutes [for the signal] to traverse the great expanse of space between Ultima and Earth... Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland greeted the reception of the signal with cheers and applause. This first radio message contained only engineering information on the status of the spacecraft, but...

Although the flyby occurred at 12:33 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the spacecraft is so far from Earth that the “phone-home” signal didn’t reach us until about 10:30 a.m. ET. Mission scientists were relieved about the success because there was only one chance to get it right as New Horizons screamed past Ultima at 31,500 miles per hour. This incredible feat was possible because thousands of operations on the spacecraft worked in sync. “We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby,” mission operations manager Alice Bowman said. “This science will help us understand the origins of our solar system.” New Horizons has...

This artist's illustration obtained from NASA on December 21, 2018 shows the New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69 - nicknamed 'Ultima Thule' - a Kuiper Belt object that orbits one billion miles beyond Pluto. (Photo: AFP/HO) ______________________________________________________________ TAMPA: A NASA spaceship is zooming toward the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever photographed by humankind, a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule about 6.4 billion km away. The US space agency will ring in the New Year with a live online broadcast to mark historic flyby of the mysterious object in a dark and frigid region of space...

This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood. The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it’s been traveling through space for the last 13 years. You may remember this famous bot: it was the first human-made object to ever visit Pluto in the summer of 2015. Ever since that flyby, New Horizons has been plunging farther into the Solar System. Three years later, it’s ready to meet up with another...

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...

At the furthest reaches of the solar system, 2019 will start off with exploration. NASA has given the final green light to its New Horizons spacecraft for a January 1st flyby of Ultima Thule, an object in the Kuiper Belt around a billion miles beyond Pluto. It will be the most distant planetary flyby in human history. Before giving the okay, NASA wanted to make sure that it wasn't passing up any other opportunities for either study or disaster in the area—rings, small moons, and anything else that a probe like New Horizons might want to observe. Pushing through the...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home another glimpse of the distant, icy body it will zoom past just three weeks from now. The small object Ultima Thule swims amid a sea of distant stars in the new composite photo, which New Horizons snapped with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera at around midnight EST (0500 GMT) on Dec. 1. At the time, the probe was 24 million miles (38.7 million kilometers) from Ultima and more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth New Horizons took the picture 33 hours before performing a record-setting engine burn to...

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...

MU69 is a relatively small Kuiper Belt object. It is estimated to have a diameter of 30 miles (48 km) — that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, but only about 0.5 to 1% of the size of the dwarf planet Pluto. This object was discovered in June 2014 by astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.Also known as PT1 and 1110113Y, and nicknamed Ultima Thule, MU69 orbits the Sun once every 293 years at a distance of more than 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km) from Earth.The MU69 flyby will be the...