NASA creates history - New Horizons Spacecraft reaches the farthest object so far in the solar system - Ultima Thule

The American space agency NASA has created history in the beginning of this year. The New Horizons Spacecraft has set a record of reaching the farthest distance in the solar system by any Spacecraft so far. It has reached the asteroid Ultima Thule, situated in the Kuiper belt, at a distance of 6.5 billion km from earth.

The asteroid was discovered back in 2014 with the help of Hubble Telescope. Its name is derived from a Latin word, which means "a place beyond the known world".

This asteroid is made up of a lot of ice, dust and perhaps some big rocks. Estimations show that it's surface is red and black in colour.

The New Horizons Spacecraft was launched by NASA back in 2006 on 19th January. The goal of this Spacecraft was to study the dwarf planet Pluto. Nine years later, on July 14th 2015, it passed nearby this planet and captured some images of it too.

The purpose of this mission is to search for extraterrestrial life far from our world. It will study the size, rotation, structure as well as the environment of Ultima and also try to learn about its origin.

The event of passing by Ultima was much more challenging than that of Pluto. The Spacecraft has powerful devices to measure the directions accurately and they are capturing such images too.

However, the long range reconnaissance imager of the Spacecraft is collecting useful data from Ultima, but if due to some reasons, the devices that send these data, stop working, then it may create a huge problem, which is a matter of great concern.

 Ultima Thule was discovered 4 years earlier and its position and motion are much more uncertain than Pluto. The robotic Spacecraft has captured many images but its position with respect to the asteroid is also quite important while capturing these images. If there is even a little disturbance in its expected position, it would capture just the images of space.

Some useful data through radio transmission were already sent by the Spacecraft which were captured by the big antennas of NASA situated in Madrid, Spain. It took 6 hrs and 8 min for these messages to be received.

The Spacecraft has also captured a low resolution picture of Ultima while flying near it. In this image, Ultima appears very faint. Scientists have estimated its size to be approximately 35x15 km. New Horizons has a 15W transmitter that sends the information @1Kbps, which means all the signals will be received till September 2020. Also, any high resolution image will be received only after February. However, some low resolution images were already received in the past week, which provide the basic information about the geography and structure of this asteroid.

Ultima has a great significance in the field of astrophysics. Its position itself has a great importance.

First main thing about this asteroid is that a very little amount of light and heat reaches it from sun due to which its temperature should be very low. Due to this, any chemical change is almost impossible to take place here, and hence it should have been in the frozen phase since the beginning when it was formed.

The second important thing is its size which is very less, which means its structure, since its formation, should also not have changed much.

The third important thing is its position in the Kuiper belt. The terrestrial objects in the inner solar system have witnessed a lot of events of collisions with each other. But the Kuiper belt has comparatively lesser number of collisions.

The principal investigator of this mission Allen stern has said that the information about Ultima would help in understanding about the things from which our solar system was formed, and when it was formed. 

The mission has a great significance because all the earlier missions of sending probes to different planets haven't provided much information because of their huge size or their high temperatures. But Ultima is different from them.

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