{"id":82212,"date":"2018-08-30T15:22:29","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T22:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/new-horizons-snags-image-of-distant-kuiper-belt-target-a-month-early"},"modified":"2018-08-30T15:22:29","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T22:22:29","slug":"new-horizons-snags-image-of-distant-kuiper-belt-target-a-month-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/new-horizons-snags-image-of-distant-kuiper-belt-target-a-month-early","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons snags image of distant Kuiper Belt target a month early"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After NASA\u2019s New Horizons<\/a> spacecraft collected a trove of data from its six-month-long flyby of Pluto<\/a>, it set its sights on a much smaller object in the Kuiper Belt \u2014 an object dubbed 2014 MU69<\/a>. Scientists believe MU69 will likely be a rather preserved outer solar system object, one that could provide clues<\/a> as to how dwarf planets like Pluto may have formed billions of years ago. Now the New Horizons team reports that it has snapped a picture of its distance target and it did so weeks before MU69 was expected to be visible to the spacecraft.<\/p>\n

New Horizons<\/a> is still about 100 million miles away from MU69 and the researchers didn\u2019t think they\u2019d be able to see the small object with New Horizons\u2019 onboard cameras until around mid-September. \u201cWe thought it\u2019s worth giving it a shot a month early,\u201d Hal Weaver, the lead scientist working with the New Horizons\u2019 long distance camera, told the New York Times<\/a><\/em>. Through a few dozen images, they were able to make out the very faint MU69, an object under 30-miles wide. Being able to see it will help scientists refine New Horizons\u2019 trajectory, though since the object was right where they expected it to be, it appears the spacecraft\u2019s path is already pretty spot on. \u201cThe whole team is jazzed now,\u201d said Weaver.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft is expected to reach MU69, also known as Ultima Thule, on January 1st, 2019. It will mark the first close-up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object and will be the most distant exploration of a planetary body to date. \u201cIt really is like finding a needle in a haystack,\u201d Weaver said in a statement<\/a> about the images collected earlier this month. \u201cIn these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that\u2019s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter \u2014 and easier to see \u2014 as the spacecraft gets closer.\u201d<\/p>\n

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After NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft collected a trove of data from its six-month-long flyby of Pluto, it set its sights on a much smaller object in the Kuiper Belt \u2014 an object dubbed 2014 MU69. Scientists believe MU69 will likely be a rather preserved outer solar system object, one that could provide clues as to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}