Snowman-shaped target of NASAs New Horizons mission gets a brand-new name

A snowman-shaped object that NASA probe New Horizons flew by in early 2019 now has a brand-new name. On November 12th, NASA officials announced that the item formerly known as MU69 — and once nicknamed Ultima Thule — would now have the name Arrokoth, which is the word for “sky” in the Powhatan / Algonquian language.

Arrokoth remains the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft — located approximately 4 billion miles away from Earth in a distant region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt. The name was chosen because the team of scientists who operate New Horizons is based in Maryland — land where the Powhatan people lived historically, and where many still live today. NASA says that they consulted with Powhatan tribal...

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