LAUREL, Md. – A small and jealous world, one billion miles beyond Pluto, is getting a visitor from Head of Year.
The spacecraft New Horizons of NASA is ready to fly a mysterious object called Ultima Thule (TOO-Lee) at 12:33 a.m. on Tuesday. It will become the most distant world explored by humanity.
The flyby arrives 3 1/2 years after New Horizons went through Pluto and gave the first plans of the dwarf planet.
This time, the drama will be deployed to 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) of the Earth, so far will be 10 hours before the flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, we know if the spacecraft survived the next meeting .
Lead scientist Alan Stern said on Monday that the team has worked for years now and now, "it's happening!"