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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft received a signal that flew near the farthest point of our solar system.
The probe was very fast, near the asteroid Altima Toli, which consists of a giant snowball of about 30 km wide.
The space probe, located 6.5 kilometers from the Earth, is the farthest distance to explore an object in the solar system.
The probe will provide NASA with a wealth of information, images and scientific data over the next few months.
An agency branch in Spain has picked up the signal from the New Horizons probe.
Staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland were applauded as the first signs of the probe arrived.
"We have a very good spacecraft," said Alice Bauman, the mission's operations manager, explaining that the vehicle will send more images and space data into the space in the airspace. next days. This first contact gives the observers a good idea of the performance of the New Horizons spacecraft when it flies 3,500 kilometers from the Tulli surface.
The asteroid in orbit is located in the Kuiper Belt, 1.5 billion kilometers from Pluto, which the New Horizons visited in 2015.
It is estimated that there are thousands of objects in the Kuiper belt, such as an asteroid in orbit, and their icy state certainly bears the evidence of the state of the solar system there about 4.6 billion years ago.
"The new spaceship, New Horizons, has conducted the longest exploration of the history of humanity, and it has been incredibly accomplished," said Alan Stern, principal investigator at New Horizons.
The new Horizons probe has been designed to approach the surface of the asteroid Ulythma, over a distance of 3,500 km, observing its rotation, its geological nature, its structure and its environment.
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