NASA's New Horizons to make history with far-out visit to Ultima Thule
In the cold vacuum of space, 1 billion miles past Pluto, a piano-sized spacecraft is about to make history.
NASA’s New Horizons probe is scheduled to fly past a mysterious object known as Ultima Thule at 9:33 p.m. PST on New Year’s Eve.
Located roughly 4 billion miles from Earth, it will be the most distant world ever visited by humankind.
And because it has probably remained in a deep freeze for 4.5 billion years, Ultima Thule could be the most pristine example of the solar system’s original disk of dust and gas ever observed.
“We’ve never seen anything like this and we don’t quite know what to expect,” said Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. “We’re going to go from a dot in the
