Nasa's New Horizons probe is preparing to make history in the early hours of New Year's Day
SCIENTISTS yesterday confirmed that a space probe had made a successful fly-by of the most distant object yet encountered in the solar system.
The probe went within 2,200 miles of the mysterious dwarf planet Ultima Thule before beaming images back to Nasa.
Ultima became the most distant object ever explored by humanity when New Horizons shot past it at around 5:33am GMT on New Year's Day.
The dwarf planet sits at the very edge of the solar system, around one billion miles beyond Pluto in a region known as the Kuiper Belt.
In studying the 19-mile-wide object, scientists hope to get a better understanding of the ancient worlds that dominate the outer reaches of our star system.
The message included a two-second timing correction to ensures New Horizons point its cameras in the right place as it whizzes past its target.
"The spacecraft is healthy and we're excited!" Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman said.
New Horizons will snap thousands of photos as well as taking other scientific data in the hours leading up to and just beyond the flyby.
Scientists at Nasa are unsure what the New Horizons mission will uncover on Ultima.
Queen guitarist Brian May, 71, who has a PhD in astrophysics, released a song named after the probe to mark the fly-by.
He plans to work on some of the probe’s images.
But it takes six hours for its signals to reach Earth — and it will take two years to get all the data back.
Scientist Alan Stern said at Mission Operations Center in Maryland, US, the probe has done its job “spectacularly”.
Dr Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, said: “What will Ultima reveal? No one knows. To me, that is what’s most exciting—this is pure exploration and fundamental science.”
Officially known as 2014 MU69, experts believe Ultima Thule is about 20 miles across, and has a red colour.
Scientists know it is a strange shape based on the unusual way it reflects sunlight, and some think the object may actually be a pair of space rocks.
Hal Weaver, a project scientist on the mission, said the icy world was "probably the most primitive object ever encountered by a spacecraft, the best possible relic of the early Solar System".
Data collected by New Horizons will reveal what Ultima looks like, what it's made of, how cold it is, and whether it has any moons.
The readings will also uncover whether Ultima has an atmosphere – one of the key components for life.
"In the space of one 72-hour period, Ultima will be transformed from a pinpoint of light — a dot in the distance — to a fully explored world," Dr Stern said.
"It should be breathtaking.”
New Horizons, which is about the size of a baby grand piano, was launched in 2006 to explore Pluto's surface.
After its successful flyby of the planet in 2015, mission planners won an extension from Nasa to prolong the probe's journey.
They settled on an object deep inside the Kuiper Belt, the so-called “twilight zone” stretching beyond Neptune.
Data from New Horizons has to travel so far that it will take days to beam back to Earth.
“We expect to have an image with almost 10,000 pixels on Ultima ready for release on January 2,” Dr Stern said.
“By that first week of January we expect to have even better images and a good idea of whether Ultima has satellites, rings or an atmosphere.”
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