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Pluto and Beyond 1x54

When the New Horizons spacecraft whizzed by Pluto in 2015, we Earthlings were dazzled by the breathtaking images it beamed home. They revealed a never-before-seen alien landscape—a world of mountains made of ice mixed with plains of frozen-solid methane and nitrogen. After more than two years of poring over the data, NASA has made remarkable new discoveries about everyone’s favorite dwarf planet. But New Horizons didn’t stop there. On New Year’s Day 2019, the probe attempts to fly by an object known now as Ultima Thule, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. This will be the most distant flyby in NASA’s history—4 billion miles from Earth. If successful, it will shed light on one of the least understood regions of our solar system: the Kuiper Belt. NOVA will again be embedded with the New Horizons mission team to follow the action as they uncover in real time the secrets of what lies beyond Pluto.