<p class="title">A NASA spacecraft on Tuesday flew past the most distant world ever studied by humankind, Ultima Thule, a frozen relic of the early solar system that could reveal how planets formed.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"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 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away."</p>.<p class="bodytext">The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 2,000 miles (3,500 kilometers).</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down," said deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Scientists expect to learn whether the pass was successful around 10 am (1500 GMT).</p>
<p class="title">A NASA spacecraft on Tuesday flew past the most distant world ever studied by humankind, Ultima Thule, a frozen relic of the early solar system that could reveal how planets formed.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"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 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Never before has a spacecraft explored something so far away."</p>.<p class="bodytext">The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by at a distance of about 2,000 miles (3,500 kilometers).</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down," said deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Scientists expect to learn whether the pass was successful around 10 am (1500 GMT).</p>