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486958 Arrokoth (provisional designation 2014 MU 69; formerly nicknamed Ultima Thule [a]) is a trans-Neptunian object located in the Kuiper belt.Arrokoth became the farthest and most primitive object in the Solar System visited by a spacecraft when the NASA space probe New Horizons conducted a flyby on 1 January 2019.
The KBO 486958 Arrokoth (green circles), the selected target for the New Horizons Kuiper belt object mission. On 19 January 2006, the first spacecraft to explore the Kuiper belt, New Horizons, was launched, which flew by Pluto on 14 July 2015. Beyond the Pluto flyby, the mission's goal was to locate and investigate other, farther objects in the ...
Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth, in images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. The only mission to date that primarily targeted a trans-Neptunian object was NASA's New Horizons, which was launched in January 2006 and flew by the Pluto system in July 2015 [32] and 486958 Arrokoth in January 2019. [33]
The New Horizons team requested, and received, a mission extension through 2021 to explore additional Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). Funding was secured on July 1, 2016. [ 160 ] During this Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM) the spacecraft performed a close fly-by of 486958 Arrokoth and will conduct more distant observations of an additional two ...
Going deeper into the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons is set to reach the small icy object known as 2014 MU69, which was first discovered by the Hubble telescope in June of 2014.
Before 486958 Arrokoth was discovered in 2014, Arawn was the best known target for a flyby by the New Horizons spacecraft after its Pluto flyby in 2015. [15] [16] Arawn was one of the first objects targeted for distant observations by New Horizons, which were taken on 2 November 2015. [17] More observations were made in April 2016. [7]
Trajectory of New Horizons and other nearby Kuiper belt objects 2014 PN70, imaged in January 2019 by the New Horizons space probe from a distance of 93 million km. Having completed its flyby of Pluto, the New Horizons space probe was to perform a flyby of at least one Kuiper belt object. Several potential targets were under consideration.
This is a list of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which are minor planets in the Solar System that orbit the Sun at a greater distance on average than Neptune, that is, their orbit has a semi-major axis greater than 30.1 astronomical units (AU). The Kuiper belt, scattered disk, and Oort cloud are three conventional divisions of this volume of ...