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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Zooming through the outer reaches of the solar system, A NASA spacecraft just clocked a distance 60 times farther from the sun than Earth.

The extraordinary benchmark announced this week means the New Horizons probe has doubled its 2015 distance, when it was snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons. 

Perhaps more surprising than this intangible deep-space milestone is the one this intrepid spacecraft hasn't reached yet: the outer edge of the solar system's Kuiper Belt, a disk beyond Neptune of countless comets and thousands of tiny ice worlds. The far-flung region is littered with leftover rubble from the time when primitive planets were forming. 

Scientists had expected the spacecraft to arrive at the proverbial edge about 1 billion miles ago. 

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