NASA spacecraft zips by most distant world ever studied

A NASA spacecraft has flown past the most distant world ever studied by humankind, Ultima Thule, a frozen relic of the early solar system that could reveal how planets formed.

An artist's illustration released by NASA, December 21, 2018, depicting the New Horizons spacecraft passing by 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule.[Photo:VCG]

"Go New Horizons!" said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33 a.m. EST when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth.

"Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away," noted Stern.

The spaceship has collected around 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 2,000 miles (3,500 kilometers).

"Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down," said deputy project scientist John Spencer with the Southwest Research Institute.

Scientists expect to learn whether the pass was successful around 10 am (1500 GMT) on Tuesday.

It is the second historic rendezvous for New Horizons, which zipped by Pluto in July 2015 on the first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet.