12 February 2018
Cosmos
Curated content from the editorial staff at Cosmos Magazine.
The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, is now on its way out to the Kuiper Belt, the wide band of small pieces of rock and ice that encircles the solar system. It is due to pass by an object there known as 2014 MU69 at the beginning of 2019.
While the craft is mainly dormant to conserve power while it travels, in December 2017 scientists at mission control briefly turned on the camera to take some calibration images.
The picture shown above, a false-colour image of a Kuiper Belt object with the designation 2012 HZ84, is the most distant photo from Earth ever taken by a spacecraft.