Washington DC: NASA's New Horizons probe is on course to flyby the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule this New Year, an event that will set the record for the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft, scientists say.
The spacecraft has successfully performed the three and half-minute manoeuvre on October 3 to home in on its location, NASA said in a statement.
The manoeuvre slightly tweaked the spacecraft's trajectory and bumped its speed by 2.1 metres per second keeping it on track to fly past Ultima -- officially named 2014 MU69 -- on January 1, 2019.
"Thanks to this manoeuvre, we're right down the middle of the pike and on time for the farthest exploration of worlds in history -- more than a billion miles beyond Pluto," said Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in the US.
At 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth, Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft.
New Horizons itself was about 6.35 billion kilometres from home when it carried out Wednesday's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM), the farthest course-correction ever performed. This was the first Ultima targeting maneuver that used pictures taken by New Horizons itself to determine the spacecraft's position relative to the Kuiper Belt object.
These "optical navigation" images -- gathered by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) -- provide direct information of Ultima's position relative to New Horizons, and help the team determine where the spacecraft is headed.
The New Horizons team designed the TCM by determining the current trajectories of the spacecraft and its target, and then calculating the manoeuvering required to put the spacecraft at the desired "aim point" for the flyby -- 3,500 kilometres -- from Ultima at closest approach. "The recent navigation images have helped us confirm that Ultima is within about 500 kilometres of its expected position, which is exceptionally good," said Fred Pelletier, New Horizons navigation team chief, of KinetX Aerospace, Inc.