NASA does the story

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The US spacecraft New Horizons celebrated about half an hour after the New Year, flying over for the first time the farthest and probably oldest celestial bodies, exploring a distance of about 6, 4 billion kilometers.

The US space agency NASA said the probe had achieved its unprecedented mission and sent a signal to the Earth requiring about 10 hours to arrive as direct transport of images and scenes from this distance was impossible.

"The sensor is working and we just finished the last flight," said Alice Boman, one of the project's leaders.

A first image of Ultima Thule, from a distance of 1.9 million kilometers, was unexpected.

On this opaque image, the tiny object (20 to 30 km) appears to be rectangular and non-circular, and the Earth will return other images in the next three days.

The asteroid "Ultima Thule" is located in the Kuiper Belt, a cloud of ancient bodies that encapsulates the solar system, and was spotted for the first time by the Hubble telescope in 2014.

Updated: 18h25

In the first New Year, "The New Horizons Probe Will Make History" when she flies near the Altima Thuley, the most distant object discovered so far in our solar system, during a mission from NASA.

At an event broadcast Tuesday afternoon, the entire world will see the spacecraft on mission near the primitive "Altima Thule", which means "out of the known world" because it is in a region still unknown .

Altima Thule, whose real name is MU69, is about 4 billion kilometers from the sun and one billion kilometers from the planet Pluto.

According to NASA, no spacecraft has ever reached this distance, and the mission is to reach a distance of about 3,500 kilometers around the object.

The Altima Thole, located in an area called the Kiber Belt, near the planet Neptune, in our solar system, contains frozen objects that are thought to be in the millions and that would have formed at the beginning of the solar system.

The vehicle will fly at this close distance to take pictures in order to study the structure of the object and its chemical components, by closely examining one of the main blocks formed during the formation of our system solar.