Britannica
Sources used in this answer
What did New Horizons discover about the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth?
Created from Britannica articles
using AI.
AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
Kuiper belt
An artist's rendition of a binary object in the Kuiper belt. The two objects depicted orbit each other at the edge of the solar system.
The New Horizons spacecraft provided significant insights into the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth during its flyby on January 1, 2019. The mission revealed that Arrokoth is a contact binary, meaning it consists of two separate objects that merged together.1