It could not have been set up any better. And its master architect, planetary scientist Alan Stern, had that in mind all along. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 2019, the famed New Horizons spacecraft had a date. In 2015, this intrepid explorer swung past the dwarf planet Pluto, giving us our first close-up view of that world and its system of moons. Now, New Horizons would take on a second target much farther out than Pluto, a distant Kuiper Belt object (KBO).

The New Horizons science team named this strange object Ultima Thule (pronounced TOO-lee), Latin for “beyond the known world.

The flyby of Ultima Thule would mark a hugely significant event: the most distant human exploration of a body in world history. And the timing, coinciding with New Year’s Eve parties from Times Square and elsewhere, would capitalize on amazing publicity that would catapult planetary exploration into hundreds of millions of living rooms across the globe. The whole extravaganza was marked by several hundred scientists and journalists converging on the campus of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, the mission’s headquarters.

I was invited to this unique New Year’s party by the lead architect and party master, Stern himself. He serves as the mission’s principal investigator, and he will contribute a story in an upcoming issue of Astronomy that will summarize the depth of the scientific findings about Ultima Thule. For now, my mission was to soak in the historic moment and to highlight the first results, the first images. Accompanying me was Senior Editor Rich Talcott, who was also busy with coverage. And the party would have a unique contribution from a friend: Brian May, a New Horizons team member and guitarist of the legendary band Queen, was on hand to debut his new song, dedicated to New Horizons.

The planning for this first-ever encounter with a KBO extended back to days after the Pluto flyby in 2015. With New Horizons showing us that dynamic little world, with its light-colored, heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio, we were all stunned by the close-up imagery of what had been the last unexplored major body of the solar system. (Yes, Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006, but the plans had long been underway to visit this world, viewed as being on the virtual edge of our solar system.)