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Having completed its flyby of Pluto, New Horizons then maneuvered for a flyby of Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth (then nicknamed Ultima Thule), which occurred on January 1, 2019, when it was 43.4 AU (6.49 billion km; 4.03 billion mi) from the Sun.
Jan 19, 2006 · In the fall of 2015, after its Pluto encounter, mission planners began to redirect New Horizons for a Jan. 1, 2019, flyby of 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt Object that is approximately 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth.
- United States of America (USA)
- New Horizons
- Pluto Flyby, Kuiper Belt Object Flyby
- 1,054 pounds (478 kilograms)
- Pluto has a “heart,” and it drives activity on the planet. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart, and Pluto seems to have taken that advice quite literally.
- There’s probably a vast, liquid, water ocean sloshing beneath Pluto’s surface. Gathered ices may not be the only thing that helped reorient Sputnik Planitia.
- Pluto may still be tectonically active because that liquid ocean is still liquid. Enormous faults stretch for hundreds of miles and cut roughly 2.5 miles into the icy crust covering Pluto’s surface.
- Pluto was—and still may be—volcanically active. But maybe not “volcanic” in the way you might think. On Earth, molten lava spits, drools, bubbles, and erupts from underwater fissures through volcanoes sitting miles high in and protruding from the oceans, like on Hawaii.
Jul 14, 2015 · After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India – making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
Jul 14, 2020 · The NASA spacecraft's nine-day flyby of Pluto in 2015 hauled in a dataset that scientists are still mining. By Mark Zastrow | Published: July 14, 2020 | Last updated on May 18, 2023. New...
Jul 15, 2020 · The distant dwarf planet had been a frigid enigma since its 1930 discovery, remaining a fuzzy blob even in photos captured by the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. But everything changed on July...
NASA's New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, flying by the dwarf planet and its moons in 2015. It found that Pluto is a complex world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and apparently even glaciers. Pluto was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
