Patience Nine-Patch

What were you doing thirteen years ago this month? We were living in a different city (we’ve moved three times since then). I was playing in a handbell choir and juggling school schedules. Aside from that, my January 2006 calendar looks a lot like this year’s. I read news of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and thought, “Cool,” before completely forgetting about it. But this month, exactly thirteen years later, New Horizons has been sending back some amazing images. Ultima Thule, the farthest object from Earth we’ve ever recorded, is a contact binary: the result of two icy heavenly bodies that are stuck together. Picture a twenty-one mile tall snowman in space and you’ll get the idea. The name Ultima Thule means “the highest attainable degree.” It orbits our sun at a distance of four billion miles.  New Horizons’ radio signals traveling at the speed of light take over 6 hours to reach Earth from there. Cool!