Summiting the Solar System Part 2: Approaching Ultima (2018)

Just after midnight on January 1st 2019, a NASA spacecraft whizzed past the most distant space rock that's ever been visited in our Solar System. This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood. The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it's been traveling through space for 13 years, the first human-made object to ever visit Pluto in the summer of 2015. Three years later, it's ready to meet up with Ultima Thule located 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. That's 4.1 billion miles from Earth, the size of New York City, orbiting in an area of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. This region of space, located beyond the orbit of Neptune,