Pluto crafts next target is Ultima Thule (earthsky.org)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Deborah Byrd in Space | March 14, 2018

New Horizons passed Pluto in 2015. With public input, the mission team has nicknamed the spacecraft’s next target – on the fringes of our solar system – Ultima Thule.

Some 115,000 people from around the world recently suggested some 34,000 possible nicknames for the distant object 2014 MU69, the next target of the New Horizons spacecraft, whose historic sweep past Pluto took place in July 2015. The New Horizons mission team announced on March 13, 2018, it has selected the name Ultima Thule – pronounced ultima thoo-lee – for New Horizon’s next target, a Kuiper Belt object officially named 2014 MU69. New Horizons will sweep closest to Ultima Thule on January 1, 2019. The mission team describes the object as:

… the most primitive world ever observed by spacecraft, in the farthest planetary encounter in history.

In a statement, the team explained their reasons for their choice:

Thule was a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography. Ultima Thule means “beyond Thule” – beyond the borders of the known world – symbolizing the exploration of the distant Kuiper Belt and Kuiper Belt objects that New Horizons is performing, something never before done.

***
more: http://earthsky.org/space/pluto-spacecraft-new-horizons-mu69-ultima-thule



Expected encounter date is easy to remember -- 1 January 2019, New Years' Day.

[Zorro]

1. Huh. I always pronounced Thule "Too-lee".

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Well, it's Greek, so "th" should really be an aspirated t -- not like our English "th".

Either choice -- unaspirated t or th -- is an approximation to the original Greek.

Ditto for "ph" and "ps" in words of Greek origin. The ancient Greeks pronounced both sounds separately, even though they used a single character for each of those sounds.

At least, that's the simplified version.