‘We have a healthy spacecraft’: NASA succeeds in historic flyby of faraway world

NASA rang in the New Year today 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.

A series of anxiously awaited “phone home” signals arrived after 15:30 GMT, indicating that the spacecraft had made it, intact, through the risky, high-speed encounter.

“We have a healthy spacecraft,” said mission operations manager Alice Bowman, as cheers erupted in the control rooms at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

About 10 hours earlier, NASA celebrated the New Year’s flyby, as mission managers — alongside kids dressed in space costumes — blew party horns to mark the moment at 12:33 am (05:33 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.

Images and data will start arriving later today, offering scientists the first up-close look at an ancient building block of planets, Bowman said.

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.

Real-time video of the actual flyby was impossible, since it takes more than six hours for a signal sent from Earth to reach the spaceship, and another six hours for the response to arrive.

Hurtling through space at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft made its closest approach within 2,200 miles 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.

Lead planetary scientist for New Horizons, Alan 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.”

Scientists are not sure what Ultima Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) looks like — whether it is cratered or smooth, or even if it is a single object or a cluster.

It was discovered in 2014 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, and is believed to be 12-20 miles in size.

A blurred and pixelated image released on Monday, taken from 1.2 million miles away, has intrigued scientists because it appears to show an elongated blob, not a round space rock.

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.

“Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down,” said deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.

Scientists decided to study Ultima Thule with New Horizons after the spaceship, which launched in 2006, 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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