Icy world passed on edge of Solar System
BY RECORD REPORTER reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk A US space probe yesterday confirmed it had made a successful flyby of the icy world known as Ultima Thule – four billion miles away.
The encounter by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft makes it the most distant ever exploration of an object in our Solar System.
New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass, which it will send home in the coming months.
The radio message from the robotic craft was picked up by one of Nasa’s big antennas, in Madrid, Spain.
It had taken fully six hours and eight minutes to traverse the great expanse of space between Ultima Thule and Earth.
Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, US, greeted the reception of the signal with cheers and applause.
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” announced mission operations manager Alice Bowman. “We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby.”
This first radio message said New Horizons had executed its autonomous flyby observations correctly and the probe’s onboard memory was full of data.
A later downlink will see some choice images returned to give a taste of what the spacecraft saw through its cameras.
Ultima Thule is in what’s termed the Kuiper belt – the band of frozen material that orbits the Sun more than 1.25billion miles further out than the eighth of the planets, Neptune – and 930million miles beyond even the dwarf planet Pluto, which New Horizons visited in 2015.