Pluto and Beyond
The New Horizons spacecraft zooms toward an object 4 billion miles from Earth.
(This program is no longer available for online streaming.) The New Horizons spacecraft attempts to fly by a mysterious object known as Arrokoth*, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. Three years after taking the first spectacular photos of Pluto, New Horizons is four billion miles from Earth, trying to achieve the most distant flyby in NASA’s history. If successful, it will shed light on one of the least understood regions of our solar system: the Kuiper Belt. NOVA is embedded with the New Horizons mission team, following the action in real time as they uncover the secrets of what lies beyond Pluto. (Premiered January 2, 2019)
*In November 2019, NASA officially renamed Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 “Arrokoth,” which means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language. The object's previous name, Ultima Thule, had once been used by the Nazi party.