Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft has survived humanity’s most distant exploration of another world.

Ten hours after the middle-of-the-night encounter four billion miles away, flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, received word from the spacecraft that it had successfully completed its latest mission.

Cheers erupted at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, home to mission control.

An anxious crowd in a nearby auditorium watching events joined in the loud celebration.

New Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule three-and-a-half years after its spectacular brush with Pluto.

Scientists say it will take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles beyond Pluto.

At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth.

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