New Horizons spacecraft will flyby Ultima Thule New Year's Day 2019

The little spacecraft that could (and is still going strong), New Horizons will make a flyby of Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule on January 1, 2019.  It will be the farthest celestial body ever visited by a spacecraft. 

New Horizons made an historic flyby of Pluto in July 2015 and NASA was searching for a KBO suitable for it to study.  Ultima Thule was discovered using the Hubble Telescope in 2014 and chosen to be the next target. 

Ultima Thule is an irregular shaped object, being two smaller bodies orbiting each other at close range, or a contact binary system (two bodies joined together).  It will take 6 hours for signals to reach Earth from New Horizons.

First images of Kuiper Belt objects taken by New Horizons

New Horizons spacecraft, which made a flyby of Pluto in July 2015, took images of two Kuiper Belt objects, the farthest images from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. 

These are falso-color images of 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 are the closest-ever pictures of Kuiper Belt objects.

New Horizons is the fifth spacecraft to travel beyond the solar system at about 700,000 miles a day.  It made a course correction back in December to set it on its way to visit dwarf planet MU69 on January 1, 2019. 

New Horizons launched toward Pluto 2006

The New Horizons spacecraft, launched January 19, 2006, performed the first flyby of Pluto, exceeding everyone's expectations.  New Horizons reached Pluto (now 'dwarf planet') in July 2015 and sent back gigabytes of data which NASA scientists will be studying for years.

New Horizons took pictures of Pluto's surface as well as its moons, giving us a much better understanding of Charon.

Buoyed on the success of the mission, the New Horizons team requested and has been granted an extension.  New Horizons is headed toward 2014 MU69, a large body in the Kuiper Belt, arriving in 2019.  It will study other trans-Neptunian objects as well.