At roughly 6 billion kilometers from Earth, the image you see to your right is the
farthest images ever taken.
The
New Horizons spacecraft captured its first images on August 16 of the remote icy world nicknamed
Ultima Thule (a traditional name of distant places beyond the known world), confirming that New Horizons is on track for its January 1 flyby around Pluto. With about 160 million kilometers to go — roughly the same distance as Earth is from the sun — the tiny world appears as no more than a faint speck in the probe’s camera.
Officially named
2014 MU69,
Ultima Thule is part of the
Kuiper Belt, a thick disk-shaped zone containing space debris left over from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. By sending New Horizons to take pictures and measure the chemical makeup of Ultima’s surface, researchers hope to unearth clues about the origin of our solar system.
