NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day during the farthest flyby in human space exploration. A short 30 minutes after…
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day during the farthest flyby in human space exploration.
A short 30 minutes after the stroke of midnight, NASA ushered in the new year with a historic flyby of Ultima Thule.
At 12:33 a.m. EST on New Year’s Day, NASA’s New Horizons probe zipped by Ultima Thule at 32,000 miles per hour, coming in as close as 2,200 miles from this mysterious alien world at the edge of the solar system.
Nestled deep within the Kuiper Belt — a vast disk of icy celestial bodies located beyond the orbit of Neptune — Ultima Thule is the most distant object to ever be visited by a man-made spacecraft.
“We set a record! Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
NASA Rings in New Year with Epic Ultima Thule Flyby 4 Billion Miles Away https://t.
