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This is your closest look yet at a Kuiper Belt object
That moving dot you see in the picture above may not seem like much at first glance, but it's a pretty big deal -- it's humanity's closest-ever look at an object in the Solar System's distant Kuiper Belt. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft recently caught 1994 JR1 on camera from "just" 170 million miles away, or 15 times closer than any Kuiper Belt object has been seen before. That's no mean feat when the celestial body is a whopping 3.3 billion miles away from the Sun, putting it beyond Pluto's current position and into the realm of even tinier dwarf planets like Haumea and Makemake.
