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NASA's New Horizons Ready for Historic Flyby of Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt

By Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor
December 28, 2018

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will ring in the new year with an epic flyby at the edge of the solar system, and the stage is set for a truly historic encounter. And it's happening amid a partial government shutdown that initially threw a curveball into how the New Horizons team will share the flyby with the public.

On New Year's Day (Jan. 1), New Horizons will fly by the distant object Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy objects that orbit the sun well beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. The flyby is a second for New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in July of 2015, and will mark the first-of-its-kind close look at a Kuiper Belt object forged during the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

"It's electric, across the whole team," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) said in short flyby preview webcast  today (Dec. 28) on YouTube and Facebook Live hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel Maryland. JHUAPL oversees the New Horizons mission for NASA. "The people are ready. We can't wait to go exploring."

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An artist's illustration of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it flies by Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto on Jan. 1, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

That focus is key because Stern and the New Horizons team are attempting something that's never been done before: the farthest flyby of an an object in history, a record last set by the same team in 2015 at Pluto.

Ultima Thule — officially known as 2014 MU69 — is 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth. That's about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, Stern said in the webcast.

If all goes well, New Horizons will zip by Ultima Thule on New Year's Day at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) at a whopping 39,000 mph (62,764 km/h). At its closest point, New Horizons will be 2,200 miles (3,540 km) from Ultima Thule. That's about the distance between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with Ultima Thule appearing about as large to New Horizons as the full moon does to observers on Earth, Stern said.

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"Very few teams have had this experience and this privilege of crossing the entirety of our solar system on a mission," Stern said in the webcast. "Really only the Pioneers and the Voyagers that came before us."

Not a lot is known about Ultima Thule. It is much smaller than Pluto, but its exact size and shape are unknown. It may have a reddish tint, but it isn't reflecting light like scientists initially expected, raising eyebrows ahead of Tuesday's flyby.

"We don't have a lot of information on the composition," said mission co-investigator Kelsi Singer of SwRI. "That's one of the things we're really excited to learn."

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