On January 1, 2019, Ultima Thule, and object in the Kuiper Belt four billion miles from Earth, will be the most ancient and most distant world ever explored close up. Ultima is expected to offer discoveries about the origin and evolution of our solar system.
On January 1, 2019, Ultima Thule, and object in the Kuiper Belt four billion miles from Earth, will be the most ancient and most distant world ever explored close up. Ultima is expected to offer discoveries about the origin and evolution of our solar system. "Summiting" goes behind the scenes of the most ambitious occultation campaigns ever mounted, as scientists deployed telescopes to Senegal and Colombia in 2018, and Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand in 2017, to glimpse Ultima as it passed in front of a star, and gathered data on the object's size and orbit that has been essential to planning the flyby. Mission scientists recall the astonishing scientific success of flying through the Pluto system in 2015, and use comparative planetology to show how Earth and Pluto are both amazingly different and—with glaciers, tall mountains, volcanoes and blue skies—awesomely similar. Appealing to space junkies and adrenaline junkies alike, "Summiting" brings viewers along for the ride of a lifetime as New Horizons pushes past Pluto and braves an even more hazardous unknown. More on the New Horizons mission: pluto.jhuapl.edu Credit: Geoff Haines Stiles of Geoff Haines Stiles Productions (GHSPi) Category Science & Technology
