New Horizons
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New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Launched in 2006, it became the first spacecraft to perform a flyby study and capture high-resolution
New Horizons before launch
Early concept art of the New Horizons spacecraft. The mission, led by the Applied Physics Laboratory and Alan Stern, eventually became the first mission to Pluto.
An artist's impression of New Horizons' close encounter with the Plutonian system
View of Mission Operations at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland (July 14, 2015)
486958 Arrokoth
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486958 Arrokoth is a small, icy Kuiper belt object orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune and Pluto. It became the farthest object in the Solar System visited by a spacecraft when the NASA space probe New Ho
New Horizons
…the Pluto flyby was received from New Horizons. 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. In August 2018…
Pamunkey tribal elder Reverend Nick Miles commencing the naming ceremony for Arrokoth
Illustration depicting the hypothesized formation sequence of Arrokoth.
Artist concept of Arrokoth as a contact binary, illustrating the understanding as of August 2017
Artist concept of an ellipsoid shape for Arrokoth, a shape that could not be ruled out prior to the flyby in 2019