NASA’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons" class="extiw" title="en:New Horizons">New Horizons</a> spacecraft recently took the closest images ever of a distant Kuiper Belt object – demonstrating its ability to observe numerous such bodies over the next several years if NASA approves an extended mission into the Kuiper Belt.
In a short animation, consisting of four frames taken by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Nov. 2, 2015, and spaced an hour apart, one can see this 90-mile (150-kilometer)-wide ancient body, officially called 1994 JR1, moving against a background of stars. When these images were made, 1994 JR1 was 3.3 billion miles (5.3 billion miles) from the sun, but only 170 million miles (280 million kilometers) away from New Horizons – setting a record, by a factor of at least 15, for the closest-ever picture of a small body in the Kuiper Belt, the solar system’s “third zone” beyond the inner, rocky planets and outer, icy gas giants.
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
2015-11-02
New Horizons mission: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20151204b">A Distant Close-up: New Horizons’ Camera Captures a Wandering Kuiper Belt Object</a>