{"id":18210,"date":"2018-12-31T01:53:22","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T17:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/watch-new-horizons-probe-ring-in-the-new-year-with-record-setting-ultima-thule-flyby\/"},"modified":"2018-12-31T01:53:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T17:53:22","slug":"watch-new-horizons-probe-ring-in-the-new-year-with-record-setting-ultima-thule-flyby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/watch-new-horizons-probe-ring-in-the-new-year-with-record-setting-ultima-thule-flyby\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch New Horizons probe ring in the New Year with record-setting Ultima Thule flyby"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"New
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, stands alongside a scale model of the New Horizons spacecraft after a briefing on the Ultima Thule flyby. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LAUREL, Md. \u2014 The sleeping bags are rolled out and the videos are cued up for a New Year\u2019s celebration of cosmic proportions here at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory, but the star of the show is still a mystery.<\/p>\n

That\u2019ll change once NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flies past an icy object more than 4 billion miles from Earth, known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule. The piano-sized probe is due to make its closest approach at 12:33 a.m. ET on New Year\u2019s Day (9:33 p.m. PT Monday), nearly 13 years after New Horizons\u2019 launch and three and a half years after it flew past Pluto.<\/p>\n

Mission managers say it\u2019s all systems go for history\u2019s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial body.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are ready to science the heck out of Ultima Thule,\u201d the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern, told reporters today at a pre-flyby briefing.<\/p>\n

Ultima Thule, pronounced \u201cUltima Too-Lee,\u201d gets its nickname from a Latin phrase designating a place beyond the known world. A few basic facts about Ultima Thule, such as its size (about 20 miles wide) and its brightness (darker than Pluto), are known. But there\u2019s much more that\u2019s unknown, including its shape and its composition.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve never, in the history of spaceflight, gone to a target that we knew less about,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

Astronomers didn\u2019t even know Ultima Thule existed when New Horizons was launched on its way to Pluto in 2006. The science team first spotted it in 2014, during a Hubble Space Telescope survey aimed at identifying objects to target after the Pluto flyby in 2015.<\/p>\n