Ultima Thule is a traditional name for distant places beyond the known world
Picture Legend
0. New Horizons & Ultima Thule
1. Largest known trans-Neptunian objects2. Pluto and the largest of its five known moons, Charon
3. The Kuiper belt
4. The Asteroid belt
5. Hubble Space Telescope
6. An annotated overlay of 5 Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 discovery images of 2014MU69 taken on June 24th, 2014. The images were taken at 10-minute intervals. The positions of 2014 MU69 in the 5 images are shown by the green circles.
7. Clyde Tombaugh & his discovery
8. New Horizons
9. Getting ready for launch
10. Asteroid 132524 APL as imaged by New Horizons
11. First images of Pluto in September 2006
12. New Horizons montage of Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io captured in three bands of infrared light
13. Jupiter’s moon Europa as imaged by New Horizons
14. Fiery Io
15. Ganymede
16. Callisto
17. Images from July 1 to 3rd, 2013, the first by New Horizons to resolve Pluto and Charon as separate objects.
18. 12 images of Charon revolving around Pluto taken July 19–24th, 2014
19. New Horizon image of Pluto taken July 8th, 2015, six days from closest approach
20. Pluto and Charon to scale during New Horizon’s approach. The spacecraft was about 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Pluto and Charon when it took this picture late on July 8th, 2015
21. Pluto’s largest moon Charon, using New Horizon’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13th, from a distance of 466,000 kilometers (289,000 miles).
22. Encounter
23. Pluto, closest approach, 3:49 am PT or 11:49 UTC on July 14, 2015
24. What you would see if you were approximately 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) above Pluto's equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio ( named after the fictional deity from the works of H. P. Lovecraft). toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) across. The image were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14th, 2015, from a distance of 80,000 kilometers (50,000 miles).
25. Close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature showing a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface.
26. Family Portrait of Pluto’s Moons: This composite image shows a sliver of Pluto’s large moon, Charon, and all four of Pluto’s small moons, as resolved by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons spacecraft. All the moons are displayed with a common intensity stretch and spatial scale (see scale bar). Charon is by far the largest of Pluto’s moons, with a diameter of 751 miles (1,212 kilometers). Nix and Hydra have comparable sizes, approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) across in their longest dimension above. Kerberos and Styx are much smaller and have comparable sizes, roughly 6-7 miles (10-12 kilometers) across in their longest dimension. All four small moons have highly elongated shapes, a characteristic thought to be typical of small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
27. Charon and Pluto in orbit. The blue cross indicates the barycentre of the two bodies
28. Animation of Pluto's orbit from 1900 to 2100
29. Orbit of Pluto – ecliptic view. This "side view" of Pluto's orbit (in red) shows its large inclination to the ecliptic
30. Animation of New Horizons flyby of Pluto
31. Size comparisons: Earth, the Moon, and Pluto
32. Tombaugh Regio
33. Cthulhu Macula
34. Pluto’s “Brass Knuckles”
35. View of Pluto as New Horizons left the system, catching the Sun's rays passing through the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, forming a ring
36. Solar map with the location of the hypothetical hydrogen wall and bow shock
37. Composite picture of Ultima Thule taken December 2nd, 2018 by New Horizons
38. Composite of two images taken by New Horizons' high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule's size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist's impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima's spin axis is indicated by the arrows.
39. First New Horizons image of Ultima Thule40. The wonders - and mysteries - of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 continue to multiply as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft beams home new images of its New Year's Day 2019 flyby target.
A trans-Neptunian object (TNO) is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than the planet Neptune, which has a semi-major axis of 30.1 astronomical units (AU, a unit of measurement equal to 149.6 million kilometers (92.9 miles), the mean distance from the center of the Earth to the center of the Sun).
When I was much younger I was taught that our solar system consisted of the Sun, a whole bunch of asteroids and comets, and nine planets. It was a matter of some pride that I managed to memorize the names of those planets, in order from their distance from the Sun. Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
When I was much older, after 1992, many other objects were discovered orbiting in the same area as Pluto, indicating that Pluto was merely one of these objects which comprised what is known as the Kuiper belt (a region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, believed to contain many comets, asteroids, and other small bodies made largely of ice), which is similar to the Asteroid belt (a region of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where most of the asteroids in our Solar System are found orbiting the Sun), but is far larger, 20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. It was argued that Pluto’s status as a full fledged planet should be reconsidered, and eventually it was reclassified as a dwarf planet (a celestial body resembling a small planet but lacking certain technical criteria that are required for it to be classed as such), 134340 Pluto specifically.
This saddened me. My life went downhill after that. I became addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, heroin, LSD, glue, Salvia divinorum, marijuana, crack, nitrous oxide, Screaming Meemies, methamphetamines, regular amphetamines, barbiturates, weezies, food, Fire Babies, flakka (I’ve been observed attempting to have sex with trees on at least two occasions), psilocybin, Pixy Stix, covfefe, peyote, Thunder Snaps, zipeprol, oxycontin, hydrocodone, chocolate and lemon frosting (straight from the can), carfentanil, amyl nitrate, ketamine, either, ecstasy, hash (and its oil), angel dust, propane, Thai sticks, khat, and placebos.
In time I got over it.
On June 26th, 2014, 1110113Y (11 for short) was discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in a preliminary survey specifically to find a suitable Kuiper belt object for a possible New Horizons probe to fly by. The discovery required the use of the Hubble Space Telescope, because ground-based observations had not found a Kuiper belt object in the zone of space that can be accessed by New Horizons.
Go outside at night and look in the direction of Pluto and see for yourself. I bet you can’t find one either. With an apparent magnitude (a number that is a measure of an astronomical object’s brightness as seen by an observer on Earth) of nearly 27, 1110113Y is far too faint for all but the most powerful telescopes.
An added benefit of using the Hubble is that it is also capable very precise astrometry (branch of astronomy that involves precise measurements of the positions and movements of stars and other celestial bodies) and therefore could provide a reliable orbit determination of 1110113Y, which NASA unofficially designated as "Potential Target 1", or PT1.
PT1‘s official designation, 2014 MU69, was assigned by the Minor Planet Center in March of 2015 after sufficient orbital information had been gathered. After more observations pinned down 2014 MU69 more precisely, it was officially given the permanent minor planet number (486958) on March 12th, 2017, making its new full official name (486958) 2014 MU69.
The nomenclature fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no. 2014 MU69's provisional designation (the naming convention applied to astronomical objects immediately following their discovery), indicates that it was the 1745th object discovered during the second half of June of 2014. A proper name for (486958) 2014 MU69 will be selected after the flyby when its nature is better known.
Then NASA invited suggestions from the public on a nickname to be used in the meantime. This campaign involved 115,000 participants from around the world, who nominated some 34,000 names. Of those, 37 names reached the ballot for voting and were evaluated for popularity... this included eight names suggested by the New Horizons team and 29 nominated by the public. The team then narrowed its selection to the 29 publicly nominated names and gave preference to names near the top of the polls. Ultima Thule was nominated by about 40 members of the public and one of the highest vote-getters among all name nominees.
In August of 1992, JPL scientist Robert Staehle called the man who discovered Pluto in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, and requested permission to visit his planet. "I told him he was welcome to it," Tombaugh later remembered, "though he's got to go on one long, cold trip." The call eventually led to a series of proposed Pluto missions, leading up to New Horizons (named after the special needs hospital in California’s famed San Fernando Valley).
Which is the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers mission category (others being the Jupiter explorer Juno, and the asteroid explorer, OSIRIS-REx). The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately $700 million over 15 years (2001–2016).
The spacecraft was built primarily by the Southwest Research Institute (based in San Antonio, Texas) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (Laurel, Maryland).
New Horizons was launched from Pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, directly south of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39, at 3 pm EST on January 19th, 2006, aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas V 551 rocket, with a third stage added to increase the heliocentric speed (enough velocity to escape the Sun’s gravity).
On April 7th, 2006, New Horizons passed the orbit of Mars, moving at roughly 21 km/s (76,000 km/h; 47,000 mph) away from the Sun at a solar distance of 243 million kilometers (150.9 million miles).
Now the probe would pass through the Asteroid belt, which as the name implies, is fairly crowded with asteroids. The New Horizons team was not particularly concerned with the spacecraft being hit, or running into a asteroid per se. Most of the rocks out there, and their positions and orbits were pretty well known (the big ones at least. It is estimated that there are between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter, and millions of smaller ones. If by chance the New Horizons craft were to collide with one of these smaller asteroids, that would be a bummer, but one that could not be forseen or able to deter. What the control team counted on was the general emptiness of space, which is profound, and the space between all of these rocks sufficient for the craft to safely pass through). No encounter with any of the asteroids had been planned, but since they were there anyway, the team looked for and found one the New Horizons would pass close enough to take a look.
In May of 2006 it was discovered that New Horizons would pass close to the tiny asteroid 132524 APL on June 13th. Closest approach occurred at 9:05 PST at a distance of 101,867 km (63,297 mi). The asteroid was imaged by the Ralph 75 mm in aperture telescope, one of the photographic instruments that make up the New Horizons' Pluto Exploration Remote Sensing Investigation (PERSI) package, with the other being the Alice instrument, an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, which could not be used to help image 132524 APL due to its relative proximity, or closeness to the Sun.
The Alice instrument (which was also utilized on the Rosetta spacecraft) was built before Ralph, and Ralph was named after Alice’s husband from the 1950‘s sitcom “The Honeymooners.”
New Horizons first got a bead on Pluto while still in the Asteroid belt. When testing the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI, a long-focal-length imager designed for high resolution and responsivity at visible wavelengths), New Horizons acquired its first image of Pluto between September 21st and the 24th. The images, taken from a distance of approximately 4.2 billion km (2.6 billion mi; 28 AU), confirmed the spacecraft's ability to track distant targets, critical for maneuvering toward Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects.
New Horizons used LORRI to take its first photographs of Jupiter on September 4th, 2006, from a distance of 291 million kilometers (181 million miles). The craft received a gravity assist (the use of the relative movement (e.g. orbit around the Sun) and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically to save propellant and reduce expense) from the giant planet, with its closest approach at 10:43:04 PM PST on February 27th, 2007, when it was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Jupiter. The flyby increased New Horizons' speed by 4 km/s (14,000 km/h; 9,000 mph), accelerating the probe to a velocity of 23 km/s (83,000 km/h; 51,000 mph) relative to the Sun and shortening its voyage to Pluto by three years.
After getting helped out by Jupiter, New Horizons was put to sleep and spent most of its journey towards Pluto in hibernation mode for there wasn’t anything for it to do during its eight year voyage to Pluto. Shutting down redundant components as well as guidance and control systems would extend their life cycle (New Horizons is powered by a cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), fueled by 9.75 kg (21.5 lb) of plutonium-238 oxide pellets. The RTG provided 245.7 watts of power at launch, and was predicted to drop approximately 5% every 4 years, decaying to 200 W by the time of its encounter with the Plutonian system and will decay too far to power the transmitters in the 2030s), decrease operation costs and free the Deep Space Network for other missions. They turned it back on for about two months a year so that the instruments could be calibrated and the systems checked.
Images from July 1st to 3rd, 2013 by LORRI were the first by the probe to resolve Pluto and Charon as separate objects.
Between July 19–24, 2014, New Horizons' LORRI snapped 12 images of Charon revolving around Pluto, covering almost one full rotation at distances ranging from about 429 to 422 million kilometers (267,000,000 to 262,000,000 mi).
On December 6th, 2014, mission controllers sent a signal for New Horizons to "wake the hell up" from its final Pluto-approach hibernation and begin regular operations. The craft's response that it was "awake" arrived to Earth on December 7th (my sister’s 56th birthday), 2014, at 6:30 PST, or 02:30 UTC (Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). It is a coordinated time scale, maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (IBWM, French: Bureau international des poids et mesures (BIPM), based at Sèvres, France). It is also known as "Z time" or "Zulu Time").
On the fourth of July, 2015, the spacecraft experienced a software anomaly and went into safe mode, preventing it from performing scientific observations until engineers could figure out what the problem was. The next day NASA announced that they thought the glitch involved a timing flaw in a command sequence used to prepare the spacecraft for its flyby, and the spacecraft would resume scheduled science operations on the 7th.
The difficulty involved compressing previously acquired data to release space for more data, and making a second copy of the approach command sequence, at the same time, which overloaded the spacecraft's primary computer. New Horizons worked as designed and once the overload was detected by itself, it switched from the primary computer to the backup computer, entered safe mode, and sent a distress call back to Earth which is what was received on July 4th. The resolution was that the problem happened as part of preparations for the approach, and was not expected to happen again because no similar tasks were planned for the remainder of the encounter.
The closest approach of the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto occurred at 3:49 am PST or 11:49 UTC on July 14th, 2015, a Tuesday morning, at a range of 12,472 km (7,750 mi) from the surface of Pluto, at a relative velocity of 13.78 km/s (49,600 km/h; 30,800 mph), which I believe everyone can agree is pretty fast.
Folks back here at home didn’t get to see much at first because New Horizons was too busy taking photographs of Pluto to be bothered to radio them back to us. But after 22 hours of planned radio silence due to the spacecraft being pointed toward the Pluto system, telemetry data confirming a successful flyby and a healthy spacecraft were received to mission control from the vicinity of the Pluto system on July 15th, 4:52 pm PST, or 0:52:37 UTC.
Then there was the problem of the low transmission rate that New Horizons used to transmit data back to Earth, and the 4.5 hours it took for a signal from the distance of Pluto to reach Earth (the planets in the solar system travel in elliptical orbits rather than perfect circles, and so the distances between them are constantly changing. At its most distant, when the two bodies are on the opposite sides of the sun from one another, Pluto lies 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. At their closest, the two are a mere 2.66 billion miles (4.28 billion km) apart.
The first details of the encounter were received the next day, but the download of the complete data set took just over 15 months, and analysis of the data took much longer, and is still going on.
Pluto’s day, or it’s rotation period, is equal to 6.39 Earth days (about 192 hours). Much like the planet Uranus, Pluto rotates on its "side" in its orbital plane, with an axial tilt of 120°, and so its seasonal variation is extreme; at its solstices, one-fourth of its surface is in continuous daylight, whereas another fourth is in continuous darkness.
Pluto’s year, or it’s orbital period is currently about 248 Earth years (90,520 days). Its orbital characteristics are much different from those of the regular planets, which follow elliptical, but nearly circular orbits around the Sun close to a flat reference plane called the ecliptic. In contrast, Pluto's orbit is moderately inclined relative to the ecliptic (over 17°) and moderately eccentric (elliptical). This eccentricity means a small region of Pluto's orbit lies closer to the Sun than Neptune's.
The Pluto–Charon barycentre (the center of mass of two or more bodies that orbit each other and is the point about which the bodies orbit, represented in picture 27. In Pluto and Charon’s case the mass ratio of Charon to Pluto is large enough that their barycentre lies outside of the physical mass of of both entities, and is represented by the blue cross in picture 27) came to perihelion (the point in the orbit of a planet, dwarf planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is closest to the sun) on September 5th, 1989, and was last closer to the Sun than Neptune between February 7th, 1979, and February 11th, 1999.
Isn’t that interesting?
Pluto's orbit is actually chaotic. Computer simulations can be used to predict its position for several million years (both forward and backward in time), but after intervals longer than the Lyapunov time (the characteristic timescale on which a dynamical system is chaotic) of 10–20 million years, calculations become speculative: Pluto is sensitive to immeasurably small details of the Solar System, hard-to-predict factors that will gradually change Pluto's position in its orbit.
I know what you’re thinking. If Pluto’s orbit at times brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune, their orbits must intersect, and at some point in this cosmic billiard game, the two will collide.
However, if we calm down and examine the matter most closely, we will discover that the two objects' orbits are aligned so that they can never collide or even approach closely.
The two orbits actually do not intersect. When Pluto is closest to the Sun, and hence closest to Neptune's orbit as viewed from above, it is also the farthest above Neptune's path. Pluto's orbit passes about 8 AU above that of Neptune, preventing a collision.
If hypothetically, the two were to collide, Neptune would just swallow up Pluto faster than a Republican Senator sucking up money from Big Oil.
Pluto's diameter is 2,376.6±3.2 km (1,476.75078±1.98839 mi), and its mass is (1.303±0.003)×1022 kg, or about 17.7% that of our Moon (0.22% that of Earth).
Its surface area is 1.779×107 km2, or roughly the same surface area as Russia. Its surface gravity is 0.063 g (compared to 1 g for Earth).
The discovery of Pluto's satellite Charon in 1978 enabled a determination of the mass of the Pluto–Charon system by application of Newton's formulation of Kepler's third law. Observations of Pluto in occultation with Charon allowed scientists to establish Pluto's diameter more accurately, whereas the invention of adaptive optics allowed them to refine an understanding of Pluto’s shape.
Pluto’s average distance from the Sun is 5,906,376,272 km, or about 3.67 billion miles. That’s the average distance. At perihelion, Pluto gets to within 4.44 billion km from the Sun. At its most distant point of its orbit, called aphelion, Pluto gets to within 7.38 billion km from that big yellow ball of hydrogen and helium.
Light from the Sun takes approximately 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance.
Just like here on the Earth the average surface temperature varies due to seasonal changes which correspond to the tilt of the Earth's axis. The Earth's axis is tilted from perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic by 23.45°. This tilting is what gives us the four seasons of the year - spring, summer, autumn (fall) and winter. Greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere keep the planet’s surface from freezing over, however, with all things considered, the average temperature for the entire planet is 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 degrees Celsius) 6 years ago, in 2013, according to data from NASA.
It’s probably warmer now.
It’s much colder on Pluto than it is here. The surface temperature is between 33 Kelvin (-240 degrees Celsius or -400 degrees Fahrenheit) at it’s coldest, and 55 Kelvin (-218 degrees Celsius or -360 degrees Fahrenheit) on a balmy afternoon. The average temperature is 44 Kelvin (-229 degrees Celsius or -380 Fahrenheit).
If you’re going to Pluto better bring those long-johns.
Pluto has five known natural satellites. The closest to Pluto is Charon. First identified in 1978 by astronomer James Christy. Charon is the only moon of Pluto in hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round shape), Charon's mass is sufficient to cause the barycentre of the Pluto–Charon system to be outside of Pluto (some could make the case that the Pluto--Charon system is a binary system, rather than a single dwarf planet with a moon). Beyond Charon there are four much smaller circumbinary moons (moons that revolve around two objects). In order of distance from Pluto they are Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.
Pluto has a tenuous atmosphere consisting of nitrogen (N2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO), which are in equilibrium with their ices on Pluto's surface. According to the measurements by New Horizons, the surface pressure is about 1 Pa (10 μbar), roughly one million to 100,000 times less than Earth's atmospheric pressure.
The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago, a recent phenomena geologically speaking. The mountains are made of water ice.
The plains on Pluto's surface are composed of more than 98 percent nitrogen ice, with traces of methane and carbon monoxide.
Pluto's surface varies greatly, with large differences in both brightness and color.
It is one of the most contrastive bodies in the Solar System, with as much contrast as Saturn's moon Iapetus. The color varies from charcoal black, to dark orange and white. Pluto's color is more similar to that of Jupiter’s moon Io, with slightly more orange and significantly less red than Mars.
Notable geographical features include Tombaugh Regio, or the "Heart" (a large bright area on the side opposite Charon), Cthulhu Macula, or the "Whale" (an elongated dark region along Pluto's equator, 2,990 km (1,860 mi) long and one of the darkest features on Pluto), and the "Brass Knuckles" (A series of semi-regularly spaced dark spots with irregular boundaries, which average about 480 km (300 mi) in diameter and are located along the equator between the Heart and the tail of the Whale).
This was a flyby mission which of course means New Horizons didn’t stop and orbit Pluto --Charon for an extended visit. No, it zipped right on by and went on it’s merry and freezing way.
Soon after the Pluto encounter New Horizons sent a message back home and reported that it was healthy, its flight path was within the margins, and science data of the Pluto–Charon system had been recorded. The spacecraft's immediate task was to begin returning the 6.25 gigabytes of information it had collected. Because of the extremely low received signal level (RSL), it could only transmit data at 1 to 2 kilobits per second, which can be rather tedious.
By March 30th, of 2016, New Horizons had reached the halfway point of transmitting this data. The transfer was completed on October 25th, at 1:48 pm PST, when the last piece of data... part of a Pluto–Charon observation sequence by the Ralph/LEISA imager—was received by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Here’s a short video which explains concisely what it was that New Horizons discovered.
The New Horizons team requested, and received, a mission extension through 2021 to explore additional Kuiper belt objects (KBOs).
Why not!? It was already out there, right? Might as well keep on exploring.
This is where Ultima Thule comes in. On August 28th, 2015, it was chosen as the flyby target. The necessary course adjustment was performed with four engine firings between October 22nd and November 4th, 2015. The flyby is scheduled for January 1st, 2019 (if you live on the East Coast of the United States. (In August of 2018, NASA confirmed, based on results by Alice on the New Horizons spacecraft, of a "hydrogen wall" at the outer edges of the Solar System that was first detected in 1992 by the two Voyager spacecraft)).
For me here in California, New Horizons will come within 3,500 kilometers of Ultima Thule on New Year’s Eve. The encounter will take place 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth, where it takes more than 6 hours for radio signals traveling at the speed of light to reach NASA's Deep Space Network.
There will only be one chance for New Horizons to perfectly aim its cameras and science instruments at the object as it zips past at 14 kilometers per second, and there may be unforeseen hazards in its path.
But that’s always been the case.
New Horizons is currently closer to the Ultima Thule than the Earth is to the Sun. The spacecraft's encounter sequence starts in five days, on Christmas Day, Dec. 25th, and will last nine days, through Jan 3rd. The closest approach is predicted for December 31st at 9:33 p.m. PST, (just after midnight, Jan. 1, at 12:33 a.m. EST, 04:33 UTC).
Then, there won't be much to do but wait and hope that things go according to plan. Around 10:00 a.m. EST on Jan. 1st, the team expects to get a health and safety report from New Horizons letting them know it survived the encounter. The first up-close images of Ultima Thule are expected to arrive on Earth between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. EST on Jan. 1st.
And after the flyby, New Horizon will continue to travel through the outer edges of our solar system, joining Voyager 1 & 2 as the only craft humanity has yet launched that might possibly reach for the stars.
New Horizons Ultima Thule Flyby Webcast Guide
New Horizons Ultima Thule Flyby What To Expect Tonight
New Horizons Survives Ultima Thule Flyby
New Horizons successfully Explores Ultima Thule
What's Next?
NASA says Ultima Thule is red and shaped like a snowman
New Horizons reveals Ultima Thule
New Movie Shows Ultima Thule from an Approaching New Horizons
New Horizons' Newest and Best-Yet View of Ultima Thule
