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NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft
January 1 , 2019
2027 days
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- NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first explorer to fly past the mysterious object - Ultima Thule, located some 4 billion miles from Earth.
- This is a historic flyby of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind.
Ultima Thule
- Ultima Thule is located in the Kuiper belt in the outermost regions of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune.
- It measures approximately 30 km in diameter, and is irregularly shaped.
- Ultima Thule has a reddish color, probably caused by exposure of hydrocarbons to sunlight over billions of years.
- Ultima Thule belongs to a class of Kuiper belt objects called the “cold classicals”, which have nearly circular orbits with low inclinations to the solar plane.
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