December 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020

Looking Back: A New Horizons New Year’s To Remember

Led by Mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, Johns Hopkins APL Director Ralph Semmel and Southwest Research Institute President/CEO Adam Hamilton, mission team members, family and special guests rang in 2019 by celebrating the exact moment when New Horizons flew by Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth at 12:33 a.m. ET on Jan. 1, 2019. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Ed Whitman

January 2, 2020 – Safe to say, 2020 came in more quietly for many members of the New Horizons mission team than did 2019. A year ago, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (now known as Arrokoth) in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in an era of exploration of the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system. That flyby was both the first ever close-up exploration of a Kuiper Belt object and the most distant exploration of any object in space — more than a billion miles beyond Pluto, which New Horizons explored in 2015. Read More

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