NASA Has Completed A Historic Milestone, Reaching The Most Distant Object We've Ever Visited

While the entire world was celebrating the shift from 2018 to 2019, a small group at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland were hard at work on January 1.

They were monitoring an even more historic event, taking place billions of miles away.

Artist's representation of Ultima Thule - Images courtesy: NASA

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The scientists there were busy navigating for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, an interplanetary space probe launched earlier in 2006. Earlier this week, it was on a course to intercept 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule.

This is a body on the extreme outer reaches of our solar system further than we've ever explored before. And on January 1, we finally got a look at it.

Actual photo of Ultima Thule and data interpretation

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Late into yesterday, the spacecraft sent back a status report indicating the flyby had gone as planned, and that it now has tonnes of data from Ultima Thule. We don't have any of it yet though, given how far away the probe is communicating from. Instead, this will be slowly doled out to us in the coming months.

At the very least though, images taken during the approach have now answered one question, that of whether Ultima Thule is just one object or two. As it turns out it is indeed a single body, it's just a strange oblong shape far from spherical. It's rotating too, though the axis was pointed about directly at New Horizons, which is why it wasn't earlier detectable.

New Horizons' ground crew after news of the success

Even weirder though, the oblong isn't even a smooth ellipse. It consists of two lobes, one smaller than the other, with a thinner neck connecting the two of them, kind of like a bowling pin.

We can expect more announcements over the coming week, perhaps especially in the next few days. But in the meantime, perhaps just take a little pride in the wonder humanity can accomplish even from 9.1 billion kilometers away.