The route from New Horizons to Ultima Thule
The route from New Horizons to Ultima Thule
New Horizons is a space probe from NASA's New Frontiers programme. The main goal is the investigation of the dwarf planet Pluto up close. Launched on 19 January 2006, it reached its destination on 14 July 2015. The images from the Pluto-Charon system taken from a distance of 12,500 kilometres were a sensation. Since the New Horizons spacecraft is not an orbiter, after the encounter with Pluto-Charon there was an opportunity to target another target in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a region that extends beyond Neptune's orbit to 18 billion kilometres from the Sun. Here, there are thousands of 'Kuiper-Belt Objects' (KBOs) at extremely low temperatures, from primitive bodies only a few kilometres in size to the dimensions of dwarf planets. And it is there that New Horizons is visiting 2014MU69, which is currently known as 'Ultima Thule'.
