Author: Jackson Ryan / Source: CNET
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is set to explore more distant worlds than ever before when it flies past 2014 MU69 in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
The craft has gradually made its approach over the last two weeks as NASA scientists performed a series of checks and trajectory corrections to ensure New Horizons is on the right track to gather as much information as possible about the mysterious object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, without crashing into any debris that may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system.
“This last day has probably been the most intense for us,” Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL, told CNET sister site CBS News. “We had these optical navigation measurements coming down much closer together, that means a lot of the team was up all night.”
She also said the spacecraft would pass within 19 miles of its aim point. That’s about 2,200 miles from the object. To put that in perspective, remember those epic photos of Pluto? New Horizons cameras snapped those as it flew 12,500 kilometers (about 7,800 miles) from the surface of the far-off dwarf planet.
Thus, New Horizons will come three times closer to Ultima Thule than it did Pluto and provide NASA researchers with valuable images and science data of a world we know practically nothing about.
On Dec. 15, the 12 researchers who make up New Horizons hazard watch team confirmed that the approach path was safe using New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). If they discovered moons or rings near Ultima, NASA would have opted for a secondary flight path, with New Horizons course-correcting…
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