The new year has started with a record-setting space mission by NASA.
Its New Horizons spacecraft has survived the most distant exploration of another world - a tiny, icy object nearly six and a half billion kilometers away from Earth.
For more on this and other news around the world we turn to our Ro Aram…
Aram… tell us more…
Well Mark… NASA scientists confirmed on New Year's Day that the New Horizons spacecraft made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of Ultima Thule.
The frozen rock looks like a peanut or bowling pin and sits just on the edge of our solar system - about 1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto.
NASA says New Horizons will ping back more detailed images and data from Ultima in the coming days, which will give a better insight into the object's creation.
Another question would be to see if Ultima is actually a single object or two objects orbiting each other.
"……..One possibility is that it's bilobate, with the the upper lobe being smaller than the lower lobe, so they would be asymmetric. Or it may be that these are two things that are actually in orbit around each other, and just blurred together because of their proximity…… If it's two separate objects, this would be an unprecedented situation in terms of how close they're there orbiting to one another and it will be spectacular to see. "
It takes roughly six hours for radio signals to reach Earth and it will take 20 months for New Horizons to send all of its flyby data.
After working on the Ultima data, researchers will then seek more funding for an extension to the mission.
New Horizons should have just enough fuel to visit another object sometime in the next decade.
