NASA gets ever-closer to its encounter with a distant world 1 billion miles past Puto

It’s getting bigger.

Last week, NASA released photos of the space exploration craft New Horizons gradually approaching an ancient, little-known object in deep space, called Ultima Thule. 

Ultima orbits the sun one billion miles past Pluto, and NASA expects to swoop close to the far-off object soon after midnight, on January 1, 2019.

It will be humanity’s farthest-ever encounter with another world.

“What will Ultima reveal? No one knows,” Alan Stern, the NASA planetary scientist leading the deep space mission, wrote last week. 

Image: nasa

NASA suspects Ultima is a type of icy mass formed some 4.5 billion years ago, during the inception of our solar system.  Read more…

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