The Voyager Mission Experience

Geologists said Thursday they are bewildered by images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft baring unseen landscapes on Pluto with unexpected “snakeskin” textures, colourful chasms routing through ancient landforms, and vivid new views of apparent glacial flows.

Now more than two years outbound from its historic encounter with Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on target for a fleeting flyby less than 2,200 miles from 2014 MU69, an icy, city-sized world set to become the most distant object ever visited, just after midnight Jan. 1, 2019. Scientists now say the probe may be able to pursue another destination some time in the 2020s.

The frozen faraway miniature world targeted for a high-speed flyby by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on 1 January 2019, now has a nickname: Ultima Thule.