>On New Year's Day 2019, the far-flung New Horizons spacecraft, which visited Pluto in 2015, set a new record when it buzzed by the most distant object yet visited by humanity: a remote space rock nicknamed Ultima Thule. The object — officially dubbed 2014 MU_(69) — orbits the sun a whopping 4 billion miles from Earth, deep within the realm of frozen rocks called the Kuiper Belt. That distance meant it took more than six hours for the spacecraft's signals — traveling at light-speed — to reach Earth. The delay will only increase as New Horizons continues speeding deeper into space at 9 miles per second. It won't finish sending back data on the space rock until summer 2020.
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