Event Horizon: Nasa spacecraft makes history, flies past Ultima Thule 6.4 billion km from Earth
- Nasa spacecraft New Horizons in historic fly-by of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind
- Ultima Thule is a cool mass roughly 32km long and shaped like a giant peanut
The nerdiest new year’s party in the solar system happened Tuesday 6.4 billion km from Earth, where Nasa spacecraft flew past a distant world called Ultima Thule, the furthest object humans have ever explored.
Nasa rang in the new year with a live online broadcast to mark the spacecraft’s zoom past the mysterious object located in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.
“Go New Horizons!” said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33am (1.33pm Hong Kong time) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four.
“Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away.”
About 10 hours later, a series of anxiously awaited “phone home” signals arrived, indicating that the spacecraft had indeed made it, intact, through the risky, high-speed encounter.
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” said mission operations manager Alice Bowman, as cheers erupted again in the lab.
The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 3,500km at a speed of 51,500km/h (32,000mph).