The New Horizons team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has been busy preparing for the spacecraft’s flyby of the Kuiper Belt Object nicknamed Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day. This update was posted on 28 December.

Video Credit: JHUAPL

BTW, Mrs Hoge and I met Alan Stern at a sushi bar in Columbia, Maryland, several years before New Horizons launched. We had been to a medical appointment and stopped for lunch, and he sat down a few seats down the bar from us. In the course of our  conversation, I found out that he was in the area to pitch the idea of the Pluto flyby mission to NASA, and I’ve been following the project’s progress ever since.