This is because New Horizons will soon enter Encounter Mode, which does not allow for engine burns.Д®ncounter Mode (or EM) is designed to ensure the flyby science even if the spacecraft malfunctions. If needed, we can transmit files to New Horizons as late as the day before arrival to correct for any offsets from our flyby design, but we cannot burn the engines any longer. We will continue to track and target the spacecraft toward our expected arrival location and time. That 0.26 meter/second burn lasted only 27 seconds and was executed perfectly by the spacecraft, cancelling about 300 kilometers (180 miles) of estimated targeting error and speeding up our arrival time by about five seconds. Just yesterday, New Horizons conducted another small trajectory correction engine burn to help us home in on Ultima. There is no longer any chance we will divert to a farther flyby distance with consequently lower-resolution images. As a result, New Horizons will approach to within 3,500 kilometers (about 2,200 miles) of Ultima early on New YearвЂ™s Day. With that information and a unanimous finding by our mission stakeholders team, I informed NASA that we are вЂњgoвЂќ to fly by Ultima on the trajectory that yields the best science. 15, the New Horizons hazard watch team concluded its work, having found no moons or rings in the path of New Horizons on its planned closest approach to Ultima.

On New YearвЂ™s Eve and New YearвЂ™s Day, New Horizons will swoop three times closer to вЂњUltimaвЂќ than we flew past Pluto!

The New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and on final approach to explore Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Laboratory/Henry Throop In this set of images taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, Ultima Thule emerges from behind stars and grows brighter as the spacecraft approaches it.

Pis art birds flying