Kuiper belt object
Arrokoth
The most distant object ever explored up close: a reddish, two-lobed Kuiper belt body visited by New Horizons in 2019.
- Distance from Earth today
- 6.47 billion km43.28 AU · light: 5 h 60 min
- Distance from the Sun today
- 6.44 billion km43.05 AU
- As of
- 2 November 2026position from NASA/JPL orbital elements
Where it is today
Top view of the plane of Earth’s orbit, compressed distance scale. Open on the big map with the time slider →
Facts
- Rotation period
- 15.9 h
- Semi-major axis
- 44.06 AU (6.59 billion km)
- Perihelion
- 42.50 AU
- Aphelion
- 45.61 AU
- Orbital period
- 292.4 years
- Orbital eccentricity
- 0.035
- Orbital inclination
- 2.5°
- Perihelion passage
- 27 October 2065
- Minimum orbit distance from Earth’s orbit (MOID)
- 41.48 AU (6.21 billion km)
Source of the figures: JPL Small-Body Database (public domain).
Discovery: 2014 – New Horizons search team (Hubble Space Telescope)
Description
Arrokoth is a small Kuiper belt object discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope during a search for a target that New Horizons could reach after Pluto. The spacecraft flew past it on 1 January 2019, making it the most distant object ever explored up close. The images showed a contact binary: two flattened, reddish lobes that gently merged early in Solar System history, suggesting that the first planetesimals formed from the gentle collapse of clouds of pebbles rather than violent collisions. Its name comes from the Powhatan and Algonquian word for sky.