NASA spacecraft halfway between Pluto and next smaller stop
Share
Tweet
April 5, 2017
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now halfway between Pluto and its next much, much smaller stop.
New Horizons — which reached the milestone this week — is bound for an even more remote object called 2014 MU69. Like Pluto, the object orbits in our solar system's twilight zone known as the Kuiper Belt, but is barely 1 percent its size. MU69 is nearly 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto.
The spacecraft will swoop past MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019.
"That flyby will set the record for the most distant world ever explored in the history of civilization," chief...
For access to this article please
sign in or
subscribe.
Reader Comments(0)