The YouTube video accompanying this story shows that the New Horizons spacecraft has survived humanity’s most distant exploration of another world.
A little over 10 hours after the middle-of-the-night encounter over 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away, flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, received word from the spacecraft. Cheers erupted at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, home to Mission Control, reports ABC News.
An anxious wait on New Year’s Eve
The nuclear-powered spacecraft passed close to 2,192 miles of its target, a small 19-mile-wide body known as Ultima Thule, at 12:33 a.m. EST (GMT-5), streaking by at 32,212 mph, 14 times faster than the bullet from an M-16 assault rifle, according to CBS News.
Because all the spacecraft’s instruments were aimed at Ultima Thule, the initial pass by New Horizons was made in radio silence. But the spacecraft’s delicate computer instruments were busy working to make the complex science timeline intended to maximize the return from its suite of cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments as accurate as possible.
As a welcome diversion – while scientists waited for the flyby to take place last night – Brian May, lead guitarist for the legendary rock band Queen who also holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics, wowed the revelers with a new music video praising the New Horizons mission.
New Horizons phones home
All is well with New Horizons after scientists confirmed signals were received from the probe, which could have been seriously damaged by even the smallest particles.
“We are ready for Ultima Thule’s science transmission, science to help us understand the origins of our solar system,” said Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for New Horizons, after making contact with what she confirmed was a “healthy” spacecraft.
At a televised news conference from NASA this morning, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, after expressing his joy that the mission has been successful, explained that the images the world has seen will be much better when the high-resolution ones are received.
Initial high-resolution views were expected to be unveiled during a briefing Wednesday. The much-sharper pictures are expected to be of the same quality as the images taken by New Horizons when it made its flyby of Pluto.
It does take a transmission six hours and eight minutes to cross the 4.1-billion-mile gulf between Ultima Thule and Earth. This time-lapse also means that New Horizons has basically been on its own when it came to fixing any little glitches that may have arisen.
The importance of Ultima Thule
Stern says there are really two attributes of Ultima Thule that make it so scientifically valuable to us. “First, because it’s so far from the sun, temperatures are down near absolute zero. As a result of that, chemical reactions are essentially frozen. The object is in such a deep freeze that it’s perfectly preserved from its original formation.”
Secondly, Stern cites the size of Ultima Thule, noting that with being just 19 miles across, “it can’t have a strong geologic engine.”
Interestingly, while the flyby took no more than the blink of an eye – it will take nearly two years (20 months) for New Horizons to beam back its immense accumulation of data from the extreme outer solar system. Think about the “mind-boggling” distance involved for just a minute.
The final bits of data from the Ultima Thule flyby will not get back to Earth until the Fall of 2020.
