Engine Burn Puts New Horizons on Track for New Year's Flyby of Ultima Thule

[Judi Lynn]

By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | October 6, 2018 07:22am ET

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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a brief engine burn on Oct. 3, the first maneuver in which it was able to rely on actual photographs it had already taken of its eventual target.

According to a NASA statement about the engine burn, it was successful and sped the spacecraft up to 4.6 mph (2.1 m/s). At the time, the spacecraft was about 3.95 billion miles (6.35 billion kilometers) away from Earth, temptingly close to its next destination.

That target is a Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule, which is about 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) away from Earth. In mid-August, the spacecraft was able to take its first image of the object, and its images now help the spacecraft's trajectory team design the small path corrections that will help it reach its target.

"Thanks to this maneuver, 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," mission principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in the statement. "It almost sounds like science fiction, but it's not. Go New Horizons!"

More:
https://www.space.com/42049-new-horizons-engine-burn-ultima-thule.html