NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past the most distant world ever studied by humankind, the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, on New Year's Day of 2019.
"Go New Horizons!" said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 0533 GMT.
The New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock which is 6.4 billion kilometers away from the Earth.
The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 3,500 kilometers.
It's the farthest flyby in the history of solar system exploration and the second for New Horizons, which visited Pluto in July 2015.
(With input from AFP)
