NASA announcement: New Horizons set for historic flyby TOMORROW

The New Horizons spacecraft is set to kick off the new year in spectacular fashion as it will make its first flyby of Ultima Thule – a 25 kilometre wide asteroid located in the Kuiper Belt – on January 1. Some 12 years after being launched from Earth, New Horizons has only recently made it to Pluto in 2016, after a gruelling four billion mile journey. Now, it is heading towards the edge of the solar system and will shortly reach Ultima Thule, where it will complete a historic flyby.

The space agency says it will pass the interstellar body at 5.33am GMT and take thousands of images as it does so.

Hal Weaver, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and a project scientist on the New Horizons mission, said: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“This is another great step in the exploration of our solar system.”

Mission operations manager Alice Bowman added: “The spacecraft is healthy and we’re excited!”

Prof Weaver added that the path is looking all clear for New Horizons, and is confident the mission will be a resounding success.

He said: “We’ve looked pretty hard for hazards and we haven’t seen anything to be concerned about, so we are sticking with our primary trajectory.”

The flyby will be the closest a spacecraft has ever got to an object in the Kuiper Belt – a circumstellar disk on the outside of our solar system full of asteroids and space rocks

The spaceship will be just 2,200 miles from the asteroid, which is impressive considering it was spotted from 4.03 billion kilometres away by the Kepler Telescope.

NASA said in a statement: “The Ultima flyby will be the first-ever close-up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object and the farthest exploration of any planetary body in history, shattering the record New Horizons itself set at Pluto in July 2015 by about one billion miles.”