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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...

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...

Now here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching New Horizons spacecraft from July 19–24, the 12 images that comprise this animation were acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from distances of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million km) and show nearly a full orbital rotation. ... Pluto and Charon are seen circling a central gravitational point known as the barycenter, which accounts for...