A few years ago, a Silicon Valley billionaire decried that he and his friends dreamed of flying cars, and instead got 140 characters. He was wrong: They, along with entrepreneurs and governments around the world, got much more — a space race on steroids.
The big picture: From Dubai to the U.S., Tokyo to Moscow, Tel Aviv to Beijing and more, billionaires, privateers and political leaders are vying to land on the Moon, colonize Mars, mine asteroids — and just get off the Earth. "Whatever we have evolved into hundreds and thousands of years from now, we'll look at these decades as when the human race moved off the planet," said Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft phoned home on Tuesday morning, confirming that the spacecraft successfully completed the most distant flyby ever conducted of a space object. At 12:33 a.m., the craft passed within about 2,200 miles of a Kuiper Belt object known as Ultima Thule.
Why it matters: Ultima Thule, which is located about 4 billion miles from Earth, is thought to be a time capsule from the formation of the solar system itself about 4.6 billion years ago. Information from New Horizons is expected to provide researchers with new data about how planets form.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on track to make space exploration history just 33 minutes into 2019 Eastern time, scientists said Monday. That's when it's expected to pass just 2,200 miles away from a tiny object known as Ultima Thule, located about 4 billion miles from Earth in a region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.
Why it matters: The flyby may give scientists new and vital insights into how the solar system and planets like Earth first formed. This is the first time scientists have ever closely studied a Kuiper Belt object, and scientists said Monday the flyby is proceeding according to plan but without a guarantee of success.
