NASA received a critical signal from one of its most distant spacecraft this morning, confirming that the vehicle has just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System. That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant — and most primitive — object that’s ever been visited by humanity.
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feet. “We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby.”
It’s a flyby that’s been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015,...