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New Horizons, New Worlds

Four billion miles away, an ancient and pristine world awaits the Pluto hunter.

Scientists have only a rough sense, based on ground observations, of the shape of MU69 (center). It could be a single blob, roughly potato-shaped (left), or a dual-lobed object (right).NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/Alex Parker

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On a desolate coastline in Patagonia, astronomer Alan Stern huddles behind a semitrailer to block his telescope from the wind. It’s not long after midnight on July 17 — the peak of southern winter — and 40 mph gusts howl across the landscape.

Stern, who heads NASA’s Pluto-visiting New Horizons mission, is one of 56 scientists with two dozen small telescopes spread for 30 miles along Argentina’s Atlantic coast. Some evade the telescope-shaking wind behind 15-foot-tall steel-framed tarps, built with supplies raided from local hardware stores. A few find shelter in natural alcoves on the beach.

“The conditions were generally miserable for observing,” Stern says. But above, the heavens were crystal clear.

Their celestial quarry: the roughly 14-mile-wide shadow of a world 4 billion miles away, one just discovered a few years earlier. When this ancient object passes in front of a background star, the star’s light dips — like ...

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