NASA craft boldly goes where no man...
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An unmanned NASA spacecraft sent a signal back to Earth yesterday that it successfully made it through a risky fly-by past the most distant planetary object ever studied, the US space agency said.
鈥淕reen status,鈥 said Alice Bowman, missions operations manager for the New Horizons spacecraft, which zipped by Ultima Thule at 12:33am.
The 鈥減hone home鈥 signals took about 10 hours to reach Earth following the fly-by, which took place 6.4 billion kilometers away.
Once it enters the peripheral layer of the belt, containing icy bodies and leftover fragments from the solar system鈥檚 creation, the probe will get its first close-up glance of Ultima Thule, a cool mass shaped like a giant peanut, using seven on-board instruments.
Scientists had not discovered Ultima Thule when the probe was launched, according to NASA.
In 2014, astronomers found Thule using the Hubble Space Telescope and selected it for New Horizon鈥檚 extended mission in 2015.
鈥淎nything鈥檚 possible out there in this very unknown region,鈥 John Spencer, deputy project scientist for New Horizons, told reporters on Monday at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Launched in January 2006, New Horizons embarked on a 6.4 billion kilometer journey toward the solar system鈥檚 frigid edge to study the dwarf planet Pluto and its five moons.
During a 2015 fly-by, the probe found Pluto to be slightly larger than previously thought. In March, it revealed that methane-rich dunes were on the icy planet鈥檚 surface. Now 1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons will seek clues about the formation of the solar system.
As the probe flies 3,500 kilometers above Thule鈥檚 surface, scientists hope it will detect the chemical composition of the atmosphere and terrain in what NASA says will be the closest observation of a body so remote.
While the mission marks the farthest close-encounter of an object within our solar system, NASA鈥檚 Voyager 1 and 2, a pair of deep space probes launched in 1977, have reached greater distances on a mission to survey extrasolar bodies. Both probes are still operational.
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