NASA spacecraft hurtles toward tiny, icy world beyond even Pluto

LAUREL, Md. — The NASA spacecraft that yielded the first close-up views of Pluto hurtled toward a New Year’s Day rendezvous with a tiny, icy world a billion miles farther out, in what would make it the most distant cosmic body ever explored by humankind.

New Horizons was on course to fly past the mysterious, primitive object nicknamed Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST Tuesday. The close encounter comes 3½ years after the probe’s swing past Pluto, which until now was the farthest object visited by a spacecraft from Earth.

This time, the drama was set to unfold more than 4 billion miles from Earth, so far away that it will be 10 hours before flight controllers find out whether the spacecraft survived the flyby.

A few black-and-white pictures might be available within an hour or two of that official confirmation, but the highly anticipated close-up shots won’t be ready until later Tuesday or Wednesday, in color, it is hoped.

“Today is the day we explore worlds farther than ever in history!! EVER,” tweeted lead scientist Alan Stern.

Stern said Monday from Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel that the team has worked years for this and now, “It’s happening!!”

He called it an auspicious beginning to 2019, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s footsteps on the moon in July 1969.