'Go New Horizons!'
Nasa rang in the New Year yesterday with a historic flyby of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind -- a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule -- in the hopes of learning more about how planets took shape.
"Go New Horizons!" said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd including kids dressed in space costumes blew party horns and cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock 6.4 billion kilometers away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.
Offering scientists the first up-close look at an ancient building block of planets, the flyby took place about a billion miles beyond Pluto, which was until now the most faraway world ever visited up close by a spacecraft.
Hurtling through space at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft aimed to make its closest approach within 2,200 miles of the surface of Ultima Thule. Stern said Ultima Thule is unique because it is a relic from the early days of the solar system and could provide answers about the origins of other planets.
The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by. Even clearer images should arrive over the next three days.
New Horizons was launched in 2006 and completed its main mission of flying by Pluto in 2015, returning the most detailed images ever taken of the dwarf planet.
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