New Horizons successfully explores Ultima Thule

Tech Explorist: New Horizons made history with the flyby of Ultima Thule, a mysterious object 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth in the Kuiper Belt. It’s the farthest flyby of an object in our solar system. The spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, introducing the era of exploration from the confounding Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that hold keys to understanding the starting points of the solar system. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, “Congratulations to NASA’s New Horizons team, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute for making history yet again.
In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, today New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system.”