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 children dressed in space costumes blew party horns and cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33am 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 1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto, which was until now the most faraway world ever visited up close by a spacecraft.
Photo: NASA / Bill Ingalls
Real-time video of the flyby was impossible, since it takes more than six hours for a signal sent from Earth to reach the spaceship.
The first signal back to Earth should come about 10 hours after the flyby.
Hurtling through space at a speed of 51,499kph, the spacecraft aimed to make its closest approach within 3,541km of the surface of Ultima Thule.
“This is a night none of us are going to forget,” said Queen guitarist Brian May — who also holds an advanced degree in astrophysics, and who recorded a solo track to honor the spacecraft and its spirit of exploration.
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 object is in such a deep freeze that it is perfectly preserved from its original formation,” he said.
“Everything we are going to learn about Ultima — from its composition to its geology to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere and those kinds of things — are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system,” Stern added.
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