New photos sent back by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal mysterious light patches and dark divots on the strange, frozen space rock known as 2014 MU69. These photos are the clearest ones yet, giving scientists the chance to explore the distant object’s terrain from 4.1 billion miles away.
Located in the Kuiper belt, a stretch of frozen objects at the edge of the Solar System, 2014 MU69 is the most distant object humanity’s gotten a close-up look at, according to a Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory news release. It’s roughly 20 miles long, and it’s thought to be basically unchanged since the Solar System’s early days — making it a tiny, enticing, far-away object to study.
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