Arrokoth
After New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015, mission controllers at NASA steered the spacecraft toward a mysterious Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69. This distant object is located around 44 AU from the Sun, or around 4 billion miles from Earth (6.5 billion km), making it the farthest object ever visited by a probe.
We knew New Horizons would find something exotic, but nothing prepared us for the images it sent back soon after its brief encounter on New Year’s Day 2019. Arrokoth, as the object is now named, looks like a two-lobed snowman. Astronomers call it a contact binary, in which two distinct objects have fused together to form a singular structure. It’s very cool, if not a bit spooky.
