New Horizons | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

New Horizons will make its closest approach in the wee hours of Jan. 1 – 12:33 a. m. EST. Closest approach will bring the spacecraft within 2,200 miles ( 3,500 kilometers ) of Ultima Thule.

Our team worked hard to determine if Ultima was detected by LORRI at such a great distance, and the result is a clear yes , said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The new target is roughly 1.6 billion kilometres ( 1 billion miles ) beyond Pluto, making it by far the most distant body in the solar system to get a close-range inspection. New Horizons launched in 2006, with a primary mission to perform a six – month reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons. At the time of these observations, Ultima Thule was 107 million miles ( 172 million kilometers ) from the New Horizons spacecraft and 4 billion miles ( 6.5 billion kilometers ) from the Sun.

The New Horizons spacecraft is speeding through space at 32,000 miles ( 51,500 kilometers ) per hour, traveling almost a million miles per day. We will have to wait till January 1, 2019, to know what’s exactly going around the smallest object in the Kuiper belt.

It flew past Pluto in 2015, providing the first close-up views of the dwarf planet. When New Horizons first glimpsed the rocky iceball in August it was just a dot. Mission scientists plan to use images like these to study many more ancient Kuiper Belt objects from New Horizons if an extended mission is approved. “This is pure exploration”, said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator.

NASA scientists have used the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager ( LORRI ) to snap images of the object’s neighborhood of space, and were able to pick it out of a cluster of brightly lit stars. The Goblin’s orbit is very skewed, and so is Sedna’s and Biden’s.

The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects, said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer.

Promisingly, the scientists used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to predict the spot where they through Ultima Thule would be. Secondly, these images are now the most distant ever taken from Earth ( New Horizons just broke its own record ). “We now have Ultima in our sights from much farther out than once thought possible. We are on Ultima’s doorstep, and an amazing exploration awaits”! Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

A NASA spacecraft is hurtling toward a historic New Year’s Day flyby of the most distant planetary object ever studied, a frozen relic of the early solar system called Ultima Thule. New Horizon’s encounter with Ultima Thule will be the most distant planetary encounter in the history of space exploration, and it has now set its sights on its target for the first time. Much more precise than we have ever tried before. It may even be two objects. NASA hopes the flyby will reveal the answers. Will the spacecraft make it? Now, its team has taken New Horizons 100 times farther. The photo was captured by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, on 16 August, part of a sequence of 48 images taken during the spacecraft’s first attempt to spot 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule by the New Horizons team.

One AU is the average Earth-sun distance – about 93 million miles ( 150 million kilometers ). For context, Pluto’s distance is around 34 AU, so 2015 TG387 is about two-and-a-half times further away from the sun than Pluto is right now.

The signal will take over 6 hours to reach mission control, mission team members said. “Except you weren’t dialing up from 4 billion miles away”, Stern said. Not only does it lie farther away than any cosmic object He added that the object will get closer by days and so it will get brighter and bigger to been seen easily. Distant observations of the Pluto system begin Jan. 15 and will continue until late July 2015; closest approach to Pluto is July 14.

These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X, Sheppard said, emphasizing their importance in expanding and redefining our knowledge of the Solar System’s evolution.

The New Horizons probe was launched in January 2006 and has been making its way through the Solar System since then. The object was discovered as part of the team’s ongoing hunt for unknown dwarf planets and Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was discovered about 80 astronomical units ( AU ) from the Sun. Circling a “very elongated” orbit, the celestial body never comes closer to the Sun ( a point called perihelion ) than 65 AU. TG387 is one of the few known objects that never comes close enough to the solar system’s giant planets, like Neptune and Jupiter, to have significant gravitational interactions with them.

We think there could be thousands of small bodies like 2015 These so-called Inner Oort Cloud objects like 2015 TG387, 2012 VP113, and Sedna are isolated from most of the Solar System’s known mass, which makes them immensely interesting, said Scott Sheppard, from Carnegie.

“The discovery of 2012 VP113 led Sheppard and Trujillo to notice similarities of the orbits of several extremely distant solar system objects, and they proposed the presence of an unknown planet several times larger than Earth – sometimes called Planet X or Planet 9 – orbiting the Sun well beyond Pluto at hundreds of AUs. TG387 out on the solar system’s fringes, but their distance makes finding them very difficult”, Tholen said.

For some 99 percent of its 40,000-year orbit, it would be too faint to see, even with today’s largest telescopes. Officially designated 2015 TG387, Follow-up observations were obtained in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 to determine 2015 TG387’s orbit. Only 2012 VP113 and Sedna, at 80 and 76 AU respectively, have more distant perihelia than 2015 TG387 is likely on the small end of being a dwarf planet, since it has a diameter of roughly 300 kilometers.

The team ran computer simulations to understand how different hypothetical Planet X orbits would affect the orbit of 2015 TG387’s orbit stable for the age of the solar system, but it was actually shepherded by PlanetX’s gravity, which keeps the smaller 2015 TG387 away from the massive planet. The simulations included a Super-Earth-mass planet at several hundred AU on an elongated orbit. Astronomers have discovered the most distant object in the solar system. Does our solar system have an undiscovered planet?

Astrophysicists at the University of Toronto have found that a close encounter with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in another planet’s ejection from the Solar System altogether. It has only enough fuel to achieve 130 meters per second. Since that time, many new objects have been discovered at much greater distances than Pluto. Accepted theory can not explain the phenomenon.

This also means the Goblin takes 40,000 years to complete one orbit of the sun. If all goes well, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, in November. In April 2017, the spacecraft will begin its Grand Finale phase. The Swedish-designed equipment will help scientists better understand the interaction of radiation from the sun, also known as solar wind, with the moon’s surface.