In just a few hours, on New Year’s Day, the New Horizons spacecraft will buzz past “Ultima Thule,” a Kuiper Belt Object; a relic of the early solar system, and the most distant object ever visited by human craft.
This post isn’t actually about the flyby — there’s tons of information already available about that. For example: From NASA; and Wikipedia; and Johns Hopkins University ; and many other sources.
Rather, this is about a fascinating backstory of how Ultima Thule came to be found: A challenge much worse than finding the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack.’
This was more like finding a firefly in a forest fire.
When scientists went looking for a post-Pluto target for New Horizons, they had to look through the plane of the galaxy. Here’s one of their early search images, below — imagine trying to find an unknown, faint dot somewhere in this visual clutter:
The full story of how they found Ultima Thule is geeky, but quite interesting.
The NASA page, A World Beyond Pluto: Finding a New Target for New Horizons is a great place to start, followed by planetary astronomer Alex Parkers’ twitter thread on the subject (he became involved with New Horizons in 2011).
Good, science-nerd reading!
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