This Morning, NASA has received a critical signal from most distant spacecraft and confirmed that the space probe, named New Horizons has just flown at the outer reaches of the Solar system. Presently, it was located more than 4 billion miles from Earth and it has passed the most distinct and most primitive object which ever been visited by the Humans.
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feat. “We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby.”
New Horizon launched in 2006 and passed by the Pluto in 2015, it becomes the first spacecraft to reach the dwarf planet. After that, the probe keeps speeding through the solar system and meet the next object nicknamed Ultima Thule. It is the object present in the Kuiper belt which is the large region of the Solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. This area is packed with millions of icy bodies which makes it similar to the distant Asteroid Belt.
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As they are the primitive and old part of the solar system ever since the whole universe came into being 4.5 billion years ago. The Kuiper belt remains unchanged since the birth of our Cosmic neighbor, and Scientist first came to know the existence of Kuiper belt three decades ago. Since then they have been trying to figuring out the Kuiper belt. New Horizons came within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule’s surface. From this distance, NASA scientists could tell a lot of things about what kind of material Ultima Thule is made of.
There is one problem to receive the data back from New Horizon is a slow process. Spacecraft team has announced later this afternoon that they will release the image of Ultima Thule taken by the vehicle, it helps us in understanding what Ultima Thule shapes turn out to be.
