Far Out

No matter what you or I do to ring in 2019, it will just not be as cool as the New Horizons spacecraft, which will celebrate the day by doing a flyby of a ball of ice 6.5 billion miles away from Earth.

The object is in our solar system's Kuiper Belt, an region of small bodies that surrounds the solar system beyond Pluto. The best pictures of KB Objects or KBOs have so far revealed little, but New Horizons will zip past 2014 MU69 at a distance of just under 2,200 miles, or three times closer than it came to Pluto in 2015. So it should get some great detail, unless 2014 MU69 has a moonlet or rings or some other nearby pal that scientists didn't see before plotting the course. The six-hour communications delay means that if there is something out there to hit, the probe will have smacked it long before mission controllers know about it.

2014 MU69 was given the nickname "Ultima Thule" a Latin phrase from antiquity referring to a place beyond the edge of the known world. As a KBO, it's probably leftover material from the early planetary disk that orbited our sun before eventually clumping into planets. This means that any data returned by New Horizons will show us things about the earliest days of our solar system.

After buzzing Ultima Thule, New Horizons is scheduled to be steered around a few other KBOs to investigate them. During that time, it will be downloading its gathered data from this flyby to scientists, a process that could take up to a year because of the distance and necessarily reduced download speeds.

Just in case you thought your old dial-up service was slow.