NASA Confirms Successful Distant Object Flyby

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has flown by a very distant icy rock; a rock that allowed the spacecraft to make the most distant flyby in human history.

NASA received a signal from one of its most distant spacecraft this morning, confirming that the spacecraft had just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System. That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant object that’s ever been visited by humanity; an icy object known as Ultima Thule.

Ultima Thule is an object in the Kuiper Belt which is a large region at the edge of the Solar System located beyond the orbit of Neptune. This area is filled with potentially millions of fragmented icy rocks such as Ultima Thule, making it similar to an Asteroid Belt. But the objects in the Kuiper Belt aren’t asteroids. They’re thought to be old fragments of the Solar System, that formed around the same time that the planets first formed 4.5 billion years ago.

It was 3 decades ago that we learned about the Kuiper belts existence. And ever since then we’ve been trying to understand it better, but this is the first time a human spacecraft has been in such close proximity as it.