(28 Dec 2018) LEAD IN
Space scientists will ring in the new year with a space first.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is headed toward a New Year's Day encounter with an icy world 4 billion miles from Earth.
STORY-LINE
The spacecraft team that brought you Pluto has an irresistible invitation this holiday season: Ring in the new year with the exploration of an even more distant and mysterious world.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the scrawny, icy object nicknamed Ultima Thule just after at 5am GMT on January 1st.
One billion miles beyond Pluto and an astounding 4 billion miles from Earth, (6.4 billion kilometers) Ultima Thule will be the farthest world ever explored by humankind.
That's what makes this deep-freeze target so enticing, it's a preserved relic dating all the way back to our solar system's origin 4.5 billion years ago.
No spacecraft has visited anything so primitive until now.
This Kuiper Belt object, or KBO, was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014.
The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System that exists beyond the eight major planets which include earth.
Officially known as 2014 MU69, this no more than 20-mile-long (32-kilometer) world earned the nickname Ultima Thule in an online vote.
In classic and medieval literature, Thule was the most distant, northernmost place beyond the known world.
New Horizons first glimpsed Ultima Thule in August. It was just a dot.
"We've never had a chance to study these ancient frozen relics of solar system formation that we think has so much to teach us about how the planets formed and what the material is that the planets formed from," says New Horizon lead scientist Alan Stern.
The New Horizons team expect good close-up pictures of Ultima Thule to be forthcoming the day after the flyby. Stern's already got a list:
"We're going to map it in colour, we're going to map it in stereo so we get the heights of all the features. We're going to map its composition. We're going to search for satellites. We're going to search for rings. We're going to search for atmosphere around Ultima. So by the time New Horizons leaves with its data banks full from the flyby, we should have on board, enough information for the first time to really understand what Kuiper Belt objects are all about," he says.
Stern expects the New Year's encounter to be riskier and more difficult than the 2015 rendezvous with Pluto.
The spacecraft is older, the target is smaller, the flyby is closer and the distance from us on Earth is more vast.
"This is a more difficult flyby than the one that we did at Pluto. The spacecraft power levels are lower and because the spacecraft is farther away, the roundtrip communication times are longer. Then add to that, that this target is a hundred times smaller than Pluto. So it's fainter and it's harder to track. Those three things conspire together to make this a much more challenging flyby," says Stern.
New Horizons will get considerably closer to Ultima Thule than it did to Pluto.
Pluto was 7,770 miles miles (12,500 kilometers) away from the craft. Scientists are hoping New Horizons will fly as close as 2,220 miles (3,500 kilometers) to Ultima Thule.
That's no mean feat because Ultima Thule is one hundred times smaller than Pluto and harder to track.
It took four and a half hours, each way, for flight controllers at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, to get a message to, or from New Horizons at Pluto.
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