{"id":83334,"date":"2018-10-06T11:02:24","date_gmt":"2018-10-06T18:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/new-horizons-sets-up-for-new-years-flyby-of-ultima-thule"},"modified":"2018-10-07T17:01:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T00:01:05","slug":"new-horizons-sets-up-for-new-years-flyby-of-ultima-thule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/new-horizons-sets-up-for-new-years-flyby-of-ultima-thule","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons sets up for New Year\u2019s flyby of Ultima Thule"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-horizons-sets-up-for-new-years-flyby-of-ultima-thule.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short engine burn on Oct. 3 to home in on the location and timing of its New Year\u2019s flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule.<\/p>\n<p>Word from the spacecraft that it had successfully performed the 3\u00bd-minute maneuver reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at around 10:20 p.m. EDThe maneuver slightly tweaked the spacecraft\u2019s trajectory and bumped its speed by 2.1 meters per second \u2013 just about 4.6 miles per hour \u2013 keeping it on track to fly past Ultima (officially named 2014 MU69) at 12:33 am EST on Jan. 1, 2019.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThanks to this maneuver, we\u2019re right down the middle of the pike and on time for the farthest exploration of worlds in history \u2013 more than a billion miles beyond Pluto,\u201d said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cIt almost sounds like science fiction, but it\u2019s not. Go New Horizons!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2018-10-horizons-year-flyby-ultima-thule.html\">https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2018&#45;10-horizons-year-flyby-ultima-thule.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short engine burn on Oct. 3 to home in on the location and timing of its New Year\u2019s flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Word from the spacecraft that it had successfully performed the 3\u00bd-minute maneuver reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83390,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83334\/revisions\/83390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}