Nasa probe reaches icy world 4bn miles away

THE US space agency’s New Horizons probe has made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of the icy world known as Ultima Thule.

The encounter occurred some 6.5bn km (4bn miles) away, making 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.

It will now send these home over 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 and Earth.

Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland 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 contained only engineering information on the status of the spacecraft, but it also confirmed that New Horizons executed its autonomous flyby observations correctly and that the probe’s onboard memory was full of data.

A later downlink on Tuesday will see images returned to give scientists and the public a taster of what New Horizons saw.

Ultima is in what’s termed the Kuiper belt – the band of frozen material that orbits the Sun more than 2 billion km further out than the eighth of the classical planets, Neptune; and 1.5 billion km beyond even the dwarf planet Pluto which New Horizons visited in 2015.

It’s estimated there are hundreds of thousands of Kuiper members like Ultima.