The New Horizons spacecraft is way out beyond the planetary...

The New Horizons spacecraft is way out beyond the planetary orbits, moving at 14km/second, and will be making a flyby and data capture of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, otherwise known as “Ultima Thule”. New Horizons has a bunch of devices for data collection and analysis, and like most space probes they have cool acronyms. In the case of New Horizons I think it’s interesting that among REX and SWAP, there’s also “Ralph”, which is a color camera and infrared spectral imager, and an “Alice”, an ultraviolet spectral imager. Ultima Thule is about 45 AU out (45 x distance of the earth to the sun), with a 6 light-hour lag (data travelling at the speed of light will take 6 hours to reach ground stations on the earth), so even though the flyby will happen around 5am UTC on January 1st, it will take some time to gather it all and present it. I can’t wait!