Public participation helped select "Ultima Thule" as the nickname of the Kuiper Belt object to be visited by the New Horizons spacecraft on January 1, 2019.
NASA and the New Horizons team are pleased to announce that our target body in the Kuiper Belt, formally known as "(486958) 2014 MU69", is being nicknamed Ultima Thule. The name comes from medieval mapmakers, where Thule (pronounced "thoo-lee") was a distant and unknown island thought to be the northernmost place on Earth. "Ultima Thule" (which translates as "farthest Thule" or "beyond Thule") has come to be used as a metaphor for any mysterious place "beyond the borders of the known world". This is an apt metaphor for the tiny object, four billion miles away, that will be the next destination of the New Horizons spacecraft.
The name was nominated independently by about 40 participants in the Frontier Worlds campaign, and was ranked very highly in the voting. Ultima Thule will serve as the unofficial nickname for MU69 through the flyby on New Year's day, 2019. Later in 2019, we will work with the International Astronomical Union to establish a formal, permanent name for the body.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the naming campaign! Now join us on our ultimate journey.
–Mark Showalter and the New Horizons Science Team
