New Horizon spacecraft spots next flyby target: Study

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made the first detection of its next flyby target - an object nicknamed Ultima Thule located in the Kuiper Belt.

The probe is scheduled to have a close encounter with Ultima Thule on Jaunary 1, 2019.

Scientists had not expected the New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to be able to see the small, dim object while still over 100 million miles away, against a dense background of stars.

Taken on August 16 and transmitted home through NASA's Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team's first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.

"The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist.

"It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that's roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter and easier to see as the spacecraft gets closer," said Weaver, LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the US