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Bowling a Strike
Featured on January 2, 2019
New Horizons scored a strike on New Year's Eve night when it skipped just 2,200 miles past 2014 MU69, an object in the Kuiper Belt about four billion miles from Earth. An early image shows that the object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, may resemble a 20-mile-long bowling pin (left). A diagram shows MU69's axis of rotation. Because of the great distance, it will take months for New Horizons to transmit all of its observations to Earth, including high-resolution images. [NASA/JHUAPL/James Tuttle Keane]
