NASA Spacecraft Readies For New Year's Rendezvous With Primordial Object Far Beyond Pluto

In a few days, as Earth moves into a new year, NASA’s New Horizons probe will attempt its trickiest feat of all: traveling back in time.

Just a tick after the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which operates the spacecraft for NASA, New Horizons will race past MU69, a 35-kilometer-wide object some 6.6 billion kilometers away, in a far-off region of the solar system called the Kuiper belt.