NASA starts new year with flyby of planetary body beyond Pluto

NASA starts new year with flyby of planetary body beyond Pluto https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2018/12/27/USAT/7e3874dc-0108-475e-acc5-99f5d3849a1c-EPA_SPACE_NASA_PLUTO_NEW_HORIZON_MISSION.JPG?crop=2134,1204,x0,y0&width=3200&height=1680&fit=bounds

NASA starts new year with flyby of planetary body beyond Pluto

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NASA starts new year with flyby of planetary body beyond Pluto

NASA kicked off 2019 by scheduling a flyby of a planetary body beyond Pluto, but can't confirm the spacecraft made it until Tuesday morning.

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NASA Flight controllers said everything looked good for New Horizons' flyby of Ultima Thule, 4 billion miles from Earth early Tuesday. Scientists celebrated in Maryland, joined by Queen Guitarist Brian May, who is also an astrophysicist. (Jan. 1)
AP

An artist's conception of the New Horizons spacecraft as it zoomed by Pluto in 2015. The craft will fly by the distant space rock Ultima Thule early on New Year's Day.(Photo: NASA (JHUAPL/SwRI), EPA)

NASA rang in the new year awaiting the flyby of a spacecraft near an icy planetary body roughly 1 billion miles away from Pluto.

The spacecraft New Horizons was expected to complete its flyby of Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. on January 1, according to NASA. But because the spacecraft is so far away, NASA is still awaiting confirmation it survived the trip.

Ultima Thule sits in the Kuiper Belt, which is about 4 billion miles away from Earth.

Team members and guest at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory gathered to celebrate both the New Year and the expected flyby of New Horizons, which launched in 2006.

Happy New Year! @NASANewHorizons made its flyby of #UltimaThule at 12:33am ET. We’ll be live at 9:45am ET as we await the confirmation signal from the spacecraft. See you in the morning! pic.twitter.com/g89vbHshdl

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) January 1, 2019

The mission marked the first reconnaissance of Pluto, completing its closest approach to the planet in 2015. NASA said the goal of the New Horizons mission is to explore Pluto and Kuiper Belt to study "the origins and outskirts of our solar system."

Last week, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the agency's social media accounts would be active despite a partial government shutdown.

"It's the farthest exploration of worlds in history and without NASA able to get the word out, I think it's going to be very much diminished for the public and that's an unintended consequence of this shutdown," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern told Florida Today.

Florida Today and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.

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