NASA news: ’TIME MACHINE’ New Horizons sends back images showing ‘birth of solar system’

New Horizons passed at a distance of 27,000 kilometres from the asteroid, and the space agency expects data from its historic mission to come flooding in in the next few weeks.

Helene Winters, New Horizons Project Manager, said: “In the coming months, New Horizons will transmit dozens of data sets to Earth, and we’ll write new chapters in the story of Ultima Thule — and the solar system.”

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado added: “This flyby is a historic achievement.