NASA’s New Horizons mission gets a brand-new name “Arrokoth”

The International Astronomical Union and Minor Planets Center, the global body for naming Kuiper Belt objects, has finally given a name for the most distant world ever explored by a space mission. It is called Arrokoth. NASA launched the New Horizons mission in January 2006. After crossing by Pluto in 2015, in 2019 it flew by Arrokoth. The New Horizons team of NASA proposed the name to the International Astronomical Union and Minor Planets Centre. On Nov 12, the Union formally gave its acceptance.  The Kuiper Belt has thousands of similar icy bodies. It is known as the third zone of the solar system, after the zone hosting the gas planets in our solar system.   NASA’s mission has broken all records of space exploration by exploring deep space objects beyond Pluto, such as Ultima Thule.