LAUREL, Md. — Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers and well-wishers here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated the moment that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule.

Almost 10 hours later, the New Horizons team finally received confirmation that the spacecraft had executed its planned observations flawlessly . In the days and months to come, the mission’s scientists expect to receive pictures of Ultima Thule and scientific data that could lead to discoveries about the origins of the sun and the planets.

[See the latest pictures of Ultima Thule here when they’re released.]

That is the latest triumph in a journey that started in 2006, when the spacecraft launched on a mission to explore Pluto. Thirteen years and more than four billion miles later, New Horizons has provided humanity’s first glimpse of a distant fragment that could be unchanged from the solar system’s earliest days.

Ultima Thule, the name that the mission team selected for the object from more than 34,000 suggestions from the public, means “beyond the borders of the known world.” (Thule is pronounced “TOO-lee.”)</s>NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft ushered in the New Year with a historic flyby of Ultima Thule — the most distant object ever visited by a space probe — gathering data that may unveil new insights into the formative years of our solar system. According to mission details published by NASA, New Horizons was scheduled to complete the flyby at around 11 am IST Tuesday.

However, the official confirmation is still awaited, as it will take hours for the spacecraft to communicate with Earth and beam back the first images of the unexplored object. Ultima Thule — which means “beyond the known world” — is located in the Kuiper belt in the outermost regions of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune.

The New Horizons spacecraft flew by Ultima Thule at a distance of 3,500 km. At the time, Ultima Thule was at a distance of almost 6.5 billion kilometres from the Sun, making this the most distant planetary flyby attempted, and the first time that a Solar System object of this type has been seen close-up, NASA said in a statement.

“Ultima is 100 times smaller than Pluto, but its scientific value is incalculable. From everything we know, it was formed 4.5 or 4.6 billion years ago, 4 billion miles from the Sun,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in the US. “It’s been stored at that enormous distance from the Sun, at a temperature of nearly absolute zero, ever since, so it likely represents the best sample of the ancient solar nebula ever studied. Nothing like it has ever been explored,” Stern said in a statement.

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“Its geology and composition should teach us a lot about how these building blocks of small planets like Pluto were formed. The New Horizons mission team is excited too, and we can’t wait to see what we will find!” he said. The New Horizons team used the Hubble Space Telescope to search for the next Kuiper Belt object to fly by after Pluto.

Using observations made with Hubble on in 2014, the science team discovered an object that New Horizons could reach with its available fuel. The object was subsequently designated 2014 MU69, given the minor planet number 485968, and based on public votes, nicknamed “Ultima Thule”.

 Ultima Thule measures approximately 30 km in diameter, and is irregularly shaped.

In July 2017, Ultima Thule passed in front of a star as seen from Earth , allowing astronomers to determine that its shape is most likely a contact binary (two bodies that are touching) or a close binary system (two objects that are orbiting each other). The New Horizons is expected to send back the first images of the object to the mission team after 8 pm IST Tuesday.

Based on observations of similar-sized solar system objects, it will almost certainly display impact craters. The lighting environment at its surface is very dim, as it receives only about 0.05 per cent of the light from the Sun that Earth does. We do know that Ultima Thule has a reddish colour, probably caused by exposure of hydrocarbons to sunlight over billions of years. The flyby will also reveal whether it has any moons, or even a ring system.

Ultima Thule belongs to a class of Kuiper belt objects called the “cold classicals”, which have nearly circular orbits with low inclinations to the solar plane, and which have not been perturbed since their formation perhaps 4.6 billion years ago. Ultima Thule will therefore be the most primitive planetary object yet explored, and will reveal to us what conditions were like in this distant part of the Solar System as it condensed from the solar nebula.</s>NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Conducts Farthest-Ever Fly-By Of An Object

NASA's New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft Tuesday. NPR's Audie Cornish talks with planetary scientist Heidi Hammel about what data from the fly by shows.

While you were ringing in the new year, a spacecraft about the size of a grand piano made history. NASA's New Horizons passed by Ultima Thule. It's the most distant object we've ever visited, over 4 billion miles away, far enough that it took several hours for the good news to reach Mission Control this morning.

CORNISH: Joining me now from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Columbia, Md., is Dr. Heidi Hammel. Welcome to the program.

HEIDI HAMMEL: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

CORNISH: So Ultima Thule sounds like the name of a comic book supervillain.

CORNISH: (Laughter) It's actually an oddly shaped icy rock. Right? It looks like a giant space peanut. Why did we want to visit this object that is billions of miles away?

HAMMEL: Well, we think that Ultima Thule is a remnant of the formation of our solar system, an object that is pristine and unprocessed. And so if we can visit this object - but we have visited - we have visited this object, and what we will learn from this is the chemical composition of the very earliest building blocks of our solar system.

CORNISH: (Laughter) And I know you're still gathering and analyzing the data. So what do you look for now as you're doing analysis?

HAMMEL: So we have only gotten the very preliminary data. Over the next weeks and months, we will be getting much higher-resolution images and color information. And that will allow us to study the properties of this object to figure out what's happening on its surface, what is its geologic structure, what is it made of exactly.

CORNISH: Now, I understand New Horizons was the same craft that took those amazingly clear pictures of Pluto back in 2015. Can we expect the same kind of high-quality images of Ultima Thule that we saw of Pluto?

HAMMEL: Now, this object, Ultima Thule, is much, much smaller than Pluto, so we don't have nearly as much data. But because it was so small, we were able to fly a little bit closer. So we will definitely get some really spectacular, beautiful images. It's going to be very interesting to see. We've never seen an object like this before, so we really have very little idea of what to expect. It's pure discovery, is what's happening here.

CORNISH: How exciting is this for someone like you who've been - who's been doing this research for so long?

HAMMEL: Oh, every spacecraft encounter we have like this is just as exciting as the previous one. I don't think we ever lose that joy, that excitement that so many people who are here have come just to be here, (laughter) to be with all of our colleagues and friends. It's almost like a grand reunion party. And we can't get enough.

It's just such a wonderful and exciting feeling to know that we and our colleagues at NASA and the Applied Physics Lab are helping to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. I mean, boy, if you could put that in a bottle and sell it, (laughter) you'd be a millionaire.

CORNISH: What a fun way to start the new year. Dr. Heidi Hammel, thank you so much.

HAMMEL: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

CORNISH: Dr. Heidi Hammel. She joined me from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Columbia, Md.</s>As people are ringing in the new year on Earth, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will be conducting a flyby of Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object more than 4 billion miles away. The object is so old and pristine that it’s essentially like going back in time to the beginning of our solar system.

The flyby is expected to happen at 12:33 a.m. ET on January 1. It will be the first exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object up close — and the most primitive world ever observed by a spacecraft. Ultima Thule orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto and is probably a bit of a time capsule from the early solar system.

New Horizons is moving through space at 31,500 miles per hour, and it has one chance to get it right as it zips past the object.

The Kuiper Belt is the edge of our solar system, part of the original disk from which the sun and planets formed. The craft is now so far from Earth that it takes six hours and eight minutes to receive a command sent from Earth.

If New Horizons sounds familiar, it’s because this is the spacecraft that conducted a historic flyby of Pluto in 2015, sending back unprecedented images of the dwarf planet and revealing new details about Pluto and its moons. The New Horizons mission was extended in 2016 to visit this Kuiper Belt object. The mission was launched in 2006 and took a 9½-year journey through space before reaching Pluto.

New Horizons will fly three times closer to Ultima than it did by Pluto, coming within 2,200 miles of it and providing a better look at the surface. After the quick flyby, New Horizons will continue on through the Kuiper Belt with other planned observations of more objects, but the mission scientists said this is the highlight.

The object was previously known as 2014 MU69. The name Ultima Thule was chosen through a nickname campaign hosted by the New Horizons team.

Thule was a mythical island on medieval maps, thought to be the most northern point on Earth. Ultima Thule essentially means “beyond Thule,” which suggests something that lies beyond what is known. It’s fitting, considering New Horizons’ pioneering journey.

“MU69 is humanity’s next Ultima Thule,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “Our spacecraft is heading beyond the limits of the known worlds, to what will be this mission’s next achievement. Since this will be the farthest exploration of any object in space in history, I like to call our flyby target Ultima, for short, symbolizing this ultimate exploration by NASA and our team.”

Once the flyby happens and mission scientists understand more about just what Ultima Thule is, NASA will choose a formal name to submit to the International Astronomical Union.

And even though missions have flown through the Kuiper Belt, considered the third zone of the solar system, they weren’t able to explore it because scientists didn’t even know about it until the 1990s.

“The Voyagers and Pioneers flew through the Kuiper Belt at a time when we didn’t know this region existed,” Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said in a statement. “New Horizons is on the hunt to understand these objects, and we invite everyone to ring in the next year with the excitement of exploring the unknown.”

The Kuiper Belt is full of small, icy bodies and worlds, and we don’t know much about Ultima Thule. It was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, scientists determined that it isn’t spherical, but more elongated. Ultima could even be two objects, but only the flyby will tell for sure.

Based on its circular orbit, as opposed to the elliptical orbits of the planets, Ultima Thule formed 4 billion miles away in the middle of the Kuiper Belt. Temperatures here are close to absolute zero because the region is so far from the sun. Ultima is 100 times smaller than Pluto, and Pluto is about the size of the United States.

And rather than being like Pluto or the large planets in our solar system, Ultima Thule is a surviving planetary building block, primitive and pristine. It was never perturbed or moved, and it formed in an area where ice is as strong and hard as rock, so it never melted or formed a core. This will provide insight about what it was like as our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago and how small planets like Pluto formed.

The New Horizons mission was extended to observe Kuiper Belt objects after its Pluto flyby, with more than two dozen Kuiper Belt objects on the list. It will also measure the Kuiper Belt’s environment.

So what can we expect? As early as January 1, images and data will be sent back to Earth from New Horizons and its suite of instruments and cameras about seven hours after that closest approach.

After a “health status check” on the spacecraft, more images will start to appear January 2 and in the first week of the new year, which will tell whether Ultima Thule is sporting any rings, satellites or an atmosphere. And we can learn its composition.

“The Ultima Thule flyby is going to be fast, it’s going to be challenging, and it’s going to yield new knowledge,” Stern wrote on the New Horizons blog. “Being the most distant exploration of anything in history, it’s also going to be historic.”</s>The ancient Greeks and Romans used the name Ultima Thule to refer to a distant place lurking just beyond the borders of the known world.

But now it’s probably more famous as the moniker of a faraway object orbiting at the furthest frontier of our solar system in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

On New Year’s Day, Nasa’s New Horizons probe performed a flyby of this remote mini-world, making it the most distant rock ever explored by humanity.

Engineers celebrated after receiving confirmation that the probe had successfully performed its manoeuvres and sped past Ultima Thule, yet one key mystery about the space rock remained unanswered for several hours yesterday.

It was initially believed that Ultima Thule was a ‘binary’ minor planet which consisted of two bodies locked in orbit around each other.

Analysis of the pics snapped by New Horizons suggest this isn’t the case.

‘The Kuiper Belt object may have a shape similar to a bowling pin, spinning end over end, with dimensions of approximately 20 by 10 miles,’ Nasa wrote.

However, Nasa did also suggest that it could still be ‘two objects orbiting each other’, so this particular case hasn’t been cracked entirely.

One ‘mystery’ Nasa has solved is the question of why its brightness doesn’t appear to vary as it rotates.

It would appear this effect is caused by the spinning motion of Ultima Thule

‘Flyby data has already solved one of Ultima’s mysteries, showing that the Kuiper Belt object is spinning like a propeller with the axis pointing approximately toward New Horizons,’ Nasa added.

‘This explains why, in earlier images taken before Ultima was resolved, its brightness didn’t appear to vary as it rotated. The team has still not determined the rotation period.’

On Twitter, Nasa fans had a few other ideas about what Thule looks like.

The space object is actually called (486958) 2014 MU69 and is believed to have formed more than four billion years ago during the very beginning of our solar system’s history, so is a relic of a bygone age which could help scientist unravel the mystery of how all the planets formed.

‘Ultima was formed in the middle of the Kuiper Belt, where temperatures are close to absolute zero,’ wrote Nasa’s Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator.

‘Because of where it was formed and the fact that Ultima is not large enough to have a geologic engine like Pluto and larger planets, we expect that Ultima is the most well-preserved sample of a planetary building block ever explored.

‘In effect, Ultima should be a valuable window into the early stages of planet formation and what the solar system was like over 4.5 billion years ago.’

The New Horizons probe reached the closest point of its flyby at 05:33 British time on New Year’s Day, passing Thule at more than 30,000 miles per hour and coming within 2,200 miles of the surface of the 19 mile-wide object.

Jim Bridenstine, a Nasa administrator, said: ‘Today New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system.

‘This is what leadership in space exploration is all about.’

Ultima Thule is more than four billion miles from Earth.</s>Nasa made history early this morning during a close encounter with a tiny and enigmatic ‘minor planet’ lurking at the frozen far reaches of our solar system.

Its New Horizons probe sped past a strange object called Ultima Thule at about 5.30am, snapping pictures as it zoomed by at high speed.

The first images will be published later today and are expected to solve a key question about the far-off object, which is floating in a cloud of comets, asteroids and dwarf planets called the Kuiper Belt.

The flyby comes three-and-a-half years after New Horizons swung past Pluto and beamed back the first ever close-up images of the dwarf planet.

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Ultima Thule is more than four million miles from Earth, making it the farthest ever object ever explored by humanity.

The probe reached the closest point of its flyby at 05:33 British time on New Year’s Day, passing Thule at more than 30,000 miles per hour and coming within 2,200 miles of the surface of the 19 mile-wide object.

To the ancient Roman and Greeks, Ultima Thule was originally the most northerly part of the Earth, but the name was used to refer to anywhere which was outside the known world.

The space object is actually called (486958) 2014 MU69 and is believed to have formed more than four billion years ago during the very beginning of our solar system’s history, so is a relic of a bygone age which could help scientist unravel the mystery of how all the planets formed.

‘Ultima was formed in the middle of the Kuiper Belt, where temperatures are close to absolute zero,’ Stern wrote.

‘Because of where it was formed and the fact that Ultima is not large enough to have a geologic engine like Pluto and larger planets, we expect that Ultima is the most well-preserved sample of a planetary building block ever explored.

‘In effect, Ultima should be a valuable window into the early stages of planet formation and what the solar system was like over 4.5 billion years ago.’

In 2015, New Horizons sped past Pluto and sent back the most detailed photographs of the icy dwarf planet humanity has ever seen.

Now it hopes to solve the mystery surrounding Ultima Thule, which is believed to be a binary system but could be something much stranger.

Scientists are already split on whether it’s elongated or even two objects – but it might be even weirder than expected.

‘An even more bizarre scenario is one in which Ultima is surrounded by many tiny tumbling moons,’ said University of Virginia’s Anne Verbiscer, a New Horizons assistant project scientist.

Nasa will reveal its early findings at a press conference held at 2.45pm UK time.</s>After the New Horizons mission zoomed by the then-unknown Ultima Thule object in the outer Solar System early on New Year's Day, the spacecraft began returning data to Earth via a deep-space network. Although only about 1 percent of that data is now on the ground, scientists were able to share some top-line findings on Wednesday.

What they have found at a distance of 44 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, or 44 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, is something of a wonderland. The Ultima Thule object, formally named 2014 MU69, is a 33km-long contact binary that somewhat resembles a snowman. Each of the two components is nearly spherical, coming together at a "neck," and this has proved important to confirming scientific ideas for how the planets and moons of the Solar System formed. Overall, the object has a reddish hue, similar to the north pole of Pluto's moon Charon.

With Ultima Thule, the astronomers behind the New Horizons mission say they have uncovered a pristine planetesimal—a small object that served as a building block for larger objects in the Solar System. In the early years of the Solar System, some 4.5 billion years ago, a large, congested disk of these planetesimals came together to form the planets and moons we now recognize in the inner Solar System.

But in the outer Solar System (and particularly the Kuiper Belt that lies beyond the orbit of Neptune), there were fewer of these planetesimals to spread around a much larger area. So some of them, like Ultima Thule, are relics of the Solar System's first few million years. "This may be the most primitive object seen by any spacecraft, and oldest that can be seen anywhere in the Solar System," said Jeff Moore, who leads the geology team for the New Horizons spacecraft, during a news conference on Wednesday.

Based on the shape and appearance of Ultima Thule, scientists believe it formed from the very slow accretion of two bodies. Over the millennia, the bodies spiraled glacially inward, perhaps at a rate of just 2-3km per hour with respect to one another. They are bound by gravity.

The data revealed Wednesday is pretty remarkable considering that Ultima Thule was not even discovered until the summer of 2014 and that scientists had to photograph the object while traveling by it at a rate of 51,500km/hour. It is only about the size of Washington, DC, illuminated by sunshine that is 1,900 times fainter than on the surface of Earth, and has the reflectivity of potting soil.

"What this spacecraft and team have done is unprecedented," said Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator.

And New Horizons is not finished. More data is now coming down that will detail Ultima Thule's composition, and more and better images are on the way. The best photographs released so far have had a resolution of about 140 meters per pixel and were taken from 50,000km away. Astronomers hope to get images with a resolution of up to 35m per pixel, Stern said.

He is also hopeful that the spacecraft will win additional funding for a third flyby—it has already captured extraordinary data about Pluto and, now, Ultima Thule. New Horizons has power and fuel for another 15 to 20 years, he said. The Kuiper Belt extends out to about 70 AU, and at its present rate, New Horizons will spend about another decade in it.

This will offer plenty of time to discover an additional object of interest along or near New Horizons' path, Stern said. The mission team will submit a bid to to NASA next year, and if the space agency approves, the astronomers will work with telescope observing teams to find another Kuiper Belt Object of note. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and it manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.</s>What have you heard or read about NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft? What do you know about Ultima Thule?

Read the timeline about New Horizons and its explorations. You might also watch the music video created by Brian May, best known as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen but also an astrophysicist working with the mission’s science team.

Why do you think the flyby of Ultima Thule is newsworthy?

Now, read the article, “NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited,” and answer the following questions:

1. When did NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft fly near Ultima Thule? How long did it take for the message about the flyby being complete to reach Earth?

2. What does the New Horizons team hope to learn about Ultima Thule and the solar system?</s>Just over a day after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Ultima Thule, scientists are ready to reveal their preliminary findings of the distant object.

Ultima Thule, or more formally 2014 MU69, is a member of the Kuiper Belt, a ring-shaped region of icy objects orbiting the sun. The area begins just beyond the orbit of Neptune, more than 4.4 billion kilometres away, and is believed to extend to about eight billion kilometres from sun.

On Facebook, Stern posted: "Planetary science fans — I think you definitely want to tune in to our press conference about Ultima Thule today, 2 pm Eastern. Just one thing, before you do, fasten your seat belts!"

Data from the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule will be coming in for about two years. Wednesday's findings will be the first data analyzed by the team.

"This mission has always been about delayed gratification," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute​ in a news conference on Tuesday. "It took us 12 years to sell it. It took us five years to build it. It took us nine years just to get to the first target."

Next week, the spacecraft will be unable to transmit any data due to radio interference from the sun. Stern said the spacecraft will once again begin transmitting in mid-January.

The main priorities for the research is mapping Ultima Thule's surface, as well as looking for any potential moons and rings.

The first images returned from New Horizons have been pixelated and difficult to make out. So far, it appears that Ultima Thule is an irregularly shaped object that is rotating on an axis, or perhaps two objects in close orbit with one another.

New Horizons was launched in 2006 on a mission to fly by Pluto. In 2015, the spacecraft passed the planet providing the first images of a world once considered our ninth planet.</s>The New Horizons probe has just sent back its first real shots of Ultima Thule, a 21-mile-long rock or planetesimal deep in the reaches of the solar system — and now the most distant object ever visited up close by mankind. The principal investigator of the mission, Alan Stern, called the accomplishment “a technical success beyond anything ever attempted before in spaceflight.”

Ultima Thule is, as early occultation studies suggested with remarkable success, what’s called a contact binary object, composed of two individual objects fused together likely through impact billions of years ago — and it’s the first ever photographed up close. This is like candy for planet scientists: learning about the creation and characteristics of this interesting type of object is a chance decades — nay, centuries — in expectation.

“We think what we’re looking at is perhaps the most primitive object that has yet been seen by any spacecraft, and may represent a class of objects that are the oldest and most primitive objects that can be seen anywhere in the solar system,” said NASA Ames’s Jeff Moore, geology and geophysics lead on New Horizons.

It’s formed of two lobes, the larger and smaller of which are named Ultima and Thule respectively, which likely accreted individually in the earliest days of the solar system, then entered each other’s influence and eventually encountered one another, fusing.

But Ultima Thule was chosen as the next target just before New Horizons buzzed Pluto not because it’s particularly interesting in itself, but because every object out there is interesting — we’ve never been up close to one! Instead, this particular rock, called MU69 when it was first identified by the Hubble during a frantic two-week search, happened to be something that the probe could swing by with minimal fuel expenditure.

“As the principal investigator I’ll say I’m surprised that, more or less picking one Kuiper Belt object out of the hat, we were able to get such a winner as this, that’s going to revolutionize our knowledge of planetary science,” Stern said.

Once it was decided — though at the time, the team had no idea how compelling MU69 would turn out to be — New Horizons altered its course to come within a few thousand miles of the object, close enough to get detailed imagery.

Until today we’ve only had pictures taken from very far away with the probe’s Long Distance Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, which produced tiny monochrome shots a few pixels across:

Great for mission control, but not for the front page. But remember that the probe was perhaps half a million miles away when it took the above images (on December 31), plus it was traveling at a relative speed of about 32,000 miles per hour. And of course there’s no good Wi-Fi out in the Kuiper belt — the data has to be painstakingly relayed back through the Deep Space Network.

The image at above was taken while the probe was much closer — about 50,000 kilometers. LORRI still produces the best details, but at that range the team can bring Ralph into play, which added the color you see.

Ralph is a set of multispectral imagers covering a variety of wavelengths and resolutions. These more-detailed images necessarily require more data to be sent home, and often need to be interpreted or tweaked by the science team in order to create a reasonable representation of what a human might see if we happened to be rolling past Ultima Thule.

The object is “about as reflective as garden variety dirt,” and of a reddish tint the team thinks may be the result of exposed volatile substances. There’s tons of variation and terrain on the surface, which we’ll get much better imagery of in time. These are just the initial shots, and New Horizons will be sending its data back for more than a year.

It was enough, however, to make some rather potato-like rough models of the object:

These shots are “just the tip of the iceberg,” Stern said. “We have far less than one percent of the data.”

“The current best picture that we have I believe has 20,000 or 28,000 pixels on the target, which way beats the six pixels we showed you last time,” he continued. “But ultimately if everything worked just right… the highest resolution image set that we took, it’ll have 35 meter resolution — it’ll ultimately be a megapixel image. It’s just going to get better and better.”

The team will continue to receive and collate data and will surely hold more press conferences as they learn more, and even more detailed imagery arrives.

The New Horizons probe itself — still hurtling outwards at 32,000 MPH — could continue to operate for another 15 or 20 years, and has fuel to change its course to perhaps find another target, but that’s all a matter of speculation for now. Stay tuned over the next year, the team suggested, but for now they’re focused on the data from Ultima Thule.
New Horizons makes a flyby of Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, at 05:33 UTC, becoming the farthest object in the solar system visited by a spacecraft. It is a contact binary.