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New Horizons

SPACE: Meet Arrokoth, the Most Distant Object Ever Explored

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Arrokoth - Live Science

Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, a term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language, mission team members announced today (Nov. 12). “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “That desire to learn is … Read more

SPACE: New Horizons Spacecraft Reaches New Record

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Kuiper Belt Objects

The New Horizons spacecraft’s imager (called the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) captured these false-color images in December 2017 of Kuiper Belt Objects 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85. These are, for now, the farthest images from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. The photos don’t look like much: blurry green splotches against pixelated blue. But they’re arguably among the most amazing photographic images ever. That’s because they were taken from the farthest point from planet Earth of any images ever captured, snapped by a spacecraft just over 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That spacecraft is … Read more