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NASA scientists will examine New Horizons Monday night to fly near the sinking Ultima, on the edge of the solar system. The probe is expected to arrive Tuesday at 0533 GMT, at the lowest distance of the asteroid, located between 6 and 400 million kilometers from the Earth.
Receives the US Space Agency NASA New Year's Eve The first signs of the New Horizons spacecraft, which will fly as close as possible to the Earth, are being closely explored by humans until today, on the edge of the solar system.
Tuesday morning, at 15:53, the probe approaches the lowest distance of the asteroid Ultima Tol, or 3,500 km.
It is located at a distance of six to 400 million kilometers from the Earth, far away from the sun, which keeps it frozen and retains the elements that it is originally at the beginning of the formation of the solar system there has four billion and 500 million years.
NASA will host the New Year with a program broadcast live on its website while the spacecraft is near the asteroid.
A moving animation will be recorded with a song by Brian May, a famous guitarist and co-founder of the Queen group, also holding a Ph.D. in astrophysics.
The first images of the asteroid "Ultima" arrive Tuesday afternoon
It will not be possible to obtain direct images of the probe in the vicinity of the asteroid, since the time required for the arrival of signals from this distance is greater than six hours.
But if things go well, the first images of Oltima will arrive before Tuesday afternoon, that scientists look forward to begin to study this crime, which will help understand the formation of the solar system.
As the spacecraft approached its objective, the enthusiasm of the scientists in charge of the mission's supervision intensified, writes space scientist Alan Stern on Twitter: "We're here, the ## 148 ## 39, probe time near the asteroid is near and in good condition. "
The asteroid Ultima Tol is located in the Kuiper Belt, a cloud of ancient bodies that encapsulates the solar system.
Scientists do not yet know exactly the shape of the asteroid, which had been spotted for the first time in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope. They also do not know whether it is one room or more.
But they know that she is too small, a hundred times smaller than the dwarf planet of Pluto.
New Horizons probe flies at 51,000 km / h in a perilous journey
To be perfectly clear, the probe was sent to the New Horizons after completing its mission to send detailed photos of Pluto in 2015, nine years after its launch of the Earth.
"We will now try to get three times more accurate images of a trio than those of Pluto," he says. "If we do, it would be great."
However, the journey is perilous, as the probe enters the space at an incredible speed of 51,500 km / h. At this speed, hitting a small object, even the size of a grain of rice, is a devastating accident that shatters it.
When the probe reaches 3,500 kilometers from the asteroid, its speed will be 14 kilometers per second.
The asteroid named Ultima Toll was named after a distant island and is mentioned in medieval literature as the frontier of the world, because the asteroid is located at the ends of the solar system including the Earth, a explained NASA.
The Kuiper belt, in which lies the asteroid, lies between 4 billion and 800 million kilometers from the Earth. This belt was discovered in the 1990s.
"These are the limits of astronomy," said Hull Weaver, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. "We have finally reached the ends of the solar system, the bodies are still there since the creation of the solar system."
France 24 / AFP
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