NASA rings in new year with historic flyby of faraway Ultima Thule

NASA rang in the new year with a flyby of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind.

In this photo provided by NASA, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., center, celebrates with school children at the exact moment that the New Horizons spacecraft made the closest approach of Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, early Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2019, at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

NASA conducted a fly-by of the farthest, and possibly the oldest, cosmic body explored by humankind — a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule — in the hopes of learning more about how planets took shape.

“Go New Horizons!” said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd including children blew party horns and cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33am (3.33pm AEDT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock 6.4 billion kilometres away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.

Offering scientists the first up-close look at an ancient building block of planets, the fly-by took place about 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto, which was until now the most faraway world visited up close by a spacecraft.

It takes more than six hours for a signal sent from Earth to reach the spaceship, and another six hours for the response to ­arrive, meaning the first images of the fly-by were not expected to arrive until early today.

AFP