An image from NASA’s spacecraft shows the odd asteroid located in the Kuiper Belt – the circumstellar disk of asteroids surrounding our solar system – resembling something similar to a snowman. NASA explained that the two spheres which make up Ultima Thule likely “ joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender”. New Horizons and Ultima Thule are a staggering 6.5 BILLION kilometres from Earth, making it the farthest object ever studied in close-up by humanity.
The distant asteroid is remnant of the formation of the early solar system – something which led NASA to describe New Horizons as a ‘time machine’.
Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and Geophysics team lead, said: “New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system.
“We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary formation, frozen in time.
“Studying Ultima Thule is helping us understand how planets form — both those in our own solar system and those orbiting other stars in our galaxy.”
New Horizons passed at a distance of 27,000 kilometres from the asteroid, and the space agency expects data from its historic mission to come flooding in in the next few weeks.
Helene Winters, New Horizons Project Manager, said: “In the coming months, New Horizons will transmit dozens of data sets to Earth, and we’ll write new chapters in the story of Ultima Thule — and the solar system.”
New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado added: “This flyby is a historic achievement.
“Never before has any spacecraft team tracked down such a small body at such high speed so far away in the abyss of space. New Horizons has set a new bar for state-of-the-art spacecraft navigation.”
New Horizons launched in 2006 and took 10 years to make it to Pluto.
Now it is on the edge of our solar system and will continue to sail into deep space until it runs out of fuel.