New Horizons heads for flyby of space rock 4bn miles from Earth [View all]
Probe could get as close as 2,200 miles from Ultima Thule before beaming back images
A Nasa probe will perform the most distant flyby in history in the early hours of New Year’s Day when it barrels past a space rock called Ultima Thule on the outer edge of the solar system.
Unless gremlins intervene, the New Horizons spacecraft will zoom by the cosmic body at 5.33am GMT and snap thousands of photographs of the dark, icy body as it speeds on into the void.
Ultima Thule lies 4bn miles from Earth in the Kuiper belt, a band of dwarf planets, space rocks and icy debris left over from the formation of the solar system 4.6bn years ago.
New Horizons is so distant that mission scientists have no way of helping out if any last-minute glitches arise. Instead, any final troubleshooting must be handled by the probe’s onboard software.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Hal Weaver, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and a project scientist on the New Horizons mission. “This is another great step in the exploration of our solar system.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/31/new-horizons-heads-for-flyby-of-space-rock-ultima-thule
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