http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark



I remember doing this for Voyager 2 passing Neptune back in '89. I stayed up until 4am at age 13!

Seeing it was far more important to me than getting sleep for a big day at work.

By Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor | January 1, 2019 02:27am ET

LAUREL, Md. — Wow, what a way to ring in the new year.
As the world celebrated the start of 2019, scientists with NASA's New Horizons spacecraft partied with them. But the bigger celebration came just over 30 minutes later, when New Horizons made history with the flyby of Ultima Thule, a mysterious object 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, home to frozen relics left over from the birth of the solar system. It's the farthest flyby of an object in our solar system; and the second rendezvous for New Horizons, which visited Pluto in July 2015.

"We set a record! Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said after the flyby today (Jan. 1). "I mean, think of it. We're a billion miles further than Pluto, and now we're going to keep going into the Kuiper Belt. [New Horizons at Ultima Thule: Full Coverage]

New Horizons flew by Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT), hurtling past at a mind-boggling 32,000 mph (51,500 km/h) as it captured the first close-up views of a Kuiper Belt object. The cosmic rendezvous occurred so far from Earth, it'll take more than 6 hours for a signal from New Horizons to reach Earth. NASA expects to hear back from the probe at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT).

"And I can't promise you success," Stern said hours before the flyby, adding that the flyby is much harder than the Pluto rendezvous. "We are straining the capabilities of this spacecraft."

More:
https://www.space.com/42871-new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby-success.html?utm_source=notification

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46729898

New Horizons: Nasa probe survives flyby of Ultima Thule

By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent

1 January 2019

(snip)
Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland greeted the reception of the signal with cheers and applause.

"We have a healthy spacecraft," announced Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman. "We've just accomplished the most distant flyby."

This first radio message contained only engineering information on the status of the spacecraft, but it included confirmation that New Horizons executed its autonomous flyby observations as instructed and that the probe's onboard memory was full.
(snip)