This artist's illustration obtained from NASA on December 21, 2018 shows the New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “Ultima Thule” – a Kuiper Belt object that orbits one billion miles beyond Pluto.
PHOTO: AFP
NASA poised to launch first Sun-skimming spaceship
"Go New Horizons!" said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.
"Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away."
The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 2,000 miles (3,500 kilometers).
"Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down," said deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.
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Scientists expect to learn whether the pass was successful around 10 am (1500 GMT).
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