It is finished! NASA's New Horizons spacecraft contacted from a distance of 4 billion miles

The NASA New Horizons scientific team today received confirmation that their spacecraft survived the New Year's meeting with the ice world 4 billion miles, known as the Ultima Thule, and carries a priceless mass of data.

"Our spacecraft escaped damage," said Alice Bowman at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, mission manager for the mission. "We have just completed the longest flight and are ready for the Ultima Thule science broadcasts that will help us understand the origin of our solar system."

The report was greeted with greetings and greetings at the APL Mission Control Center.
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“This spacecraft is very durable!”, Said mission chief investigator Alan Stern in an interview with GeekWire right after the New Horizons status report.

An important report came through an antenna in Spain, which is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, just after 10:30 AM Eastern Time (7:30 Pacific Time) - 10 hours after a probe the size of a piano flew past an object 20 miles, known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule.

This delay was partly due to the fact that New Horizons had to complete the loading of scientific data before it could turn its antenna back to transmit, and another important factor was the light travel time of more than 6 hours for signals.

Today’s 15-minute Home Phone program was designed to enable the mission team at APL to know that the spacecraft is in good condition and successfully recorded readings from its cameras and other scientific instruments.

Data will arrive over the next few days at a rate of no more than 1000 bits per second. This speed is very low due to the limitations of the 15-watt spacecraft transmitter, and also because of the large distances.

But ultimately, the research team expects to receive detailed images — plus temperature readings, spectral analysis, and the number of particles — from the world, which is considered one of the most primitive objects in the solar system. New Horizons accelerated to a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, flying near the Ultima Thule facility at a distance of 2,200 miles.

During a press conference an hour after the “call home,” the leaders of the missionary team shared an updated photo of Ultima Thule, based on images sent just before the flyby.

The heavily processed picture showed that it was an elongated object, about 21 miles long and 9 miles wide (35 by 15 kilometers), having the shape of a bilobate, similar to peanuts or a bowling skittle. (Or, for that matter, as, for example, Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the space rubber duck, studied near the Rosetta mission of the European Space Agency a few years ago.)

Researcher of the project Hal Weaver (Hal Weaver) said that a series of shots showed that Ultima is rotating, but it is too early to say whether the rotation period is approaching 15 or 30 o'clock. In any case, it looks like the object was rotating right in front of the New Horizons camera during the approach.

"It looks like a propeller," said Weaver.

There is a possibility that Ultima may be two close objects, and not one mass.

More detailed images of overflights will be made public on Wednesday, bringing the New Horizons discovery campaign of many years back into full swing.

It is expected that it will take 20 months to download all the data. “This mission has always been about delayed pleasure,” said Stern.

Scientists say that Ultima Thule represents a class of objects known as “cold classic objects” in the Kuiper Belt, an extensive ice material beyond the orbit of Neptune. Cold classical objects are a relatively unchanged residue from the beginnings of the solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago.

"This is really a fossil, a relic of the time of education," says Weaver.

This distinguishes Ultim from Pluto, which was the main goal of New Horizons in 2015. Ultima Thule was chosen as the next target after an intense search that used observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope.

At a press conference, Bowman said that Ultima Tule’s “home phone” was different from Pluto’s experience, partly because the fly-over triumph reached its climax on New Year’s Eve, the night before the contact was confirmed.

“It was a feeling as if,“ Damn it, we are already celebrating, but have not yet received a return signal, ”she said. "I think this time I was a little nervous, but we did it again."