American Cinematographers 1922: "Give Us a Place to Stand and We Will Film the Universe"
A NASA spacecraft on New Year's Day went farther than any spacecraft has gone before - 4 billion miles from Earth. NASA received a signal from the New Horizons spacecraft Tuesday morning that it had reached a small space object known as Ultima Thule 10 hours earlier. The full scope of observations made by New Horizons will take nearly 2 years to beam back to Earth because it traveled so far.
In honor of the spacecraft's latest endeavor, Queen guitarist Brian May, who is also an astrophysicist, debuted a song at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory that he wrote for the event.
Now, after making history at the Pluto system, New Horizons has become the first spacecraft ever to visit an object discovered after said spacecraft launched. As the probe sailed toward its main target in 2014, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find 2014 MU69, a dim object that orbits the sun every 297 Earth-years on a near-circular orbit. "We didn't know about this thing, [and] that makes it so crazy," says Marc Buie, the astronomer who discovered MU69. At more than four billion miles from the sun, MU69 is now the most distant object humans have ever explored. And because it has probably been in its current orbit since it formed 4.5 billion years ago, it is an ideal time capsule for understanding the raw material that formed the planets in our solar system.