Ultima Thule Archives

Pluto and Beyond

Science / 2 minutes of reading / January 20, 2019 / By HDclump

In Pluto and Beyond: the New Horizons spacecraft attempts to fly by a mysterious object known as Ultima Thule, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. Three years after taking the first spectacular photos of Pluto, New Horizons is four billion miles from Earth, trying to achieve the most distant flyby in NASA’s history. If successful, it will shed light on one of the least understood regions of our solar system: the Kuiper Belt. NOVA is embedded with the New Horizons mission team, following the action in real time as they uncover the secrets of what […]

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The Sky at Night – Beyond Pluto episode 1 2019

Science / 2 minutes of reading / January 14, 2019 / By HDclump

The Sky at Night – Beyond Pluto: On 1st January 2019, Nasa’s New Horizons probe notched up another historic first: the first ever Kuiper belt fly-by. Its target was 2014 MU69, a chunk of ice and rock about four billion miles (approximately 6.4 billion kilometres) from Earth, dubbed Ultima Thule, a Latin phrase meaning a distant, unknown region. It is the most distant fly-by in history, and it is believed the data New Horizons gathers will shed new light on the solar system’s early days. Chris Lintott reports from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to bring the

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