Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

22 MARCH-APRIL 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES by NASA NASA’s New Horizons mission reveals entirely new kind of world T his image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the most de- tailed of Ultima Thule returned so far by the New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilome- ters), with an original scale of 730 feet (140 meters) per pixel. [NASA/Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Applied Physics Laboratory/ Southwest Research Institute] O n January 2, 2019, Scien- tists from NASA’s New Horizons mission re- leased the first detailed images of the most distant object ever explored — the Kuiper Belt ob- ject nicknamed Ultima Thule. Its remarkable appearance, un- like anything we’ve seen be- fore, illuminates the processes that built the planets four and a half billion years ago. “This flyby is a historic achieve- ment,” said New Horizons Prin-