New Horizons Spacecraft Waking Up

[Yazata]

This is the spacecraft that imaged Pluto (the humiliated former planet with a giant heart on its side) a while ago.

New Horizons has been resting, but now it's being prepared for a close encounter with a small Kuiper Belt Object with the catchy name 2014MU69, about New Years 2018/2019. The New Horizons team call the target object 'Ultima Thule'. They plan to image Ultima Thule's surface, determine whether it looks more like an asteroid or a comet, look for signs of activity like outgassing and determine the thing's mass. It's a little thing, less then 50 km across, more of an ice asteroid than a planet, though apparently they aren't exactly sure how big it is, since the size estimates vary a lot. It might not be round. But it's seemingly representative of many thousands of objects out there in the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Neptune. I guess that sad forlorn Pluto has been relegated to just being one of the largest of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

[Image: De2IdzDVMAEfN47.jpg:large]