New Horizons Survived its Flyby of Ultima Thule

New Horizons successfully “phoned home” at 10:28 a.m. EST, letting NASA scientists know all of its systems survived the flyby of Ultima Thule. The first real images will now slowly trickle in over the coming hours and days.

“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Mission Operations Manager, “MOM,” Alice Bowman announced to a crowd of cheering scientists Tuesday morning.

Not long after the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, as 2018 gave way to 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the far-out space rock Ultima Thule. At 12:33 am EST this morning, the craft passed within 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), formally known as 2014 MU69. This was the farthest object that any craft has ever visited.

Now, New Horizons will beam the first information and images from this close flyby back to Earth. However, seeing as the exploratory spacecraft is about four billion miles (6.6 billion km) from our home planet, this data takes a while to travel back to Earth. In fact, it takes more than six hours for radio signals carrying information from New Horizons to deliver the data to NASA’s Deep Space Network.

New Horizons, Phone Home

At 10:28 am EST today, New Horizons made its pre-programed “phone home,” letting the mission team back on Earth know that the craft completed the flyby unharmed. This call didn’t include any information about the object, but later today the first science data and imagery of the far-out space rock will be available.

At 3:15 pm EST, the first science data will arrive from the craft, including a grainy image just 100 pixels across. This first image of the peanut-shaped object will be followed by more scientific data and higher-resolution images over the next few hours and days.

Tomorrow, Jan 2, at 8:55 pm EST, a better, 200-pixel image of the asteroid may be available, depending on how the rock is positioned. New Horizons was set to take a total of 900 highest-resolution images throughout the flyby and the mission team will know in time how many of those images clearly show Ultima Thule. All in all, New Horizons will collect 50 gigabits of data, as compared to the 55 gigabits collected at Pluto.

For those looking to keep up with the influx of science data and imagery, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which live-streamed coverage of the flyby, will continue to provide updates in press conferences which can be viewed here.