Opinion Three cheers for space robots

Daniel Britt is the Pegasus professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Central Florida. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, including New Horizons. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, now exploring the vast region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, completed yet another trip full of superlatives: Last week, it celebrated its closest approach to Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever visited by spacecraft. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles past Pluto, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals take more than six hours to travel from the spacecraft back to NASA's receivers. At this distance, the sun is just the brightest star in sight, and the local temperature is a balmy minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit.