
The space snowman that was the focus of a close encounter with NASA’s New Horizons probe last year is helping scientists answer a cosmic question: How did the building blocks of the solar system get their start?
“This is a game-changer,” said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for the New Horizons mission.
Stern and other members of the New Horizons science team shared their latest findings about the snowman-shaped object now known as Arrokoth today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Seattle. Those findings are detailed in a trio of studies published by the journal Science.