Good morning and welcome to Kid News. I'm Kim. Today is Tuesday, January 1st, New Year's Day 2019.

And we begin with an historic close encounter in a world far far away.

At approximately 12.33 a.m. this morning, NASA's new Horizons probe was scheduled to zip by

the most distant planetary object that humans have ever studied.

The mysterious chunk of rock and ice is known as Ultima Touli, which means a place beyond

the known world.

And it got that name for good reason.

The object resides 1 billion miles past Pluto

in an unexplored corner of space called the Kuiper belt.

New Horizons was expected to race past the rock at 32,000 miles an hour, or 9 miles per second, passing within 2,000 miles of Ultima's as-yet unseen surface.

It'll take hours for NASA to confirm a successful mission

and hours more to receive images.

If all goes well, we should get a look

at the first high resolution photos tomorrow.

This is one devoted dad and one very lucky daughter.

25 year old Pierce Vaughn had just gotten her wings as a flight attendant for Delta.

The new job meant she'd be spending Christmas airborne and alone instead of with her family.

But dad had a plan.

If she had to fly, so would he. Hal Vaughn accompanied his daughter on six flights

over three days, including on Christmas. Their tandem journey took them from New Orleans to

Detroit to Fort Myers back to Detroit to

Hartford, Atlanta and New Orleans once again. Even more remarkable he flew standby

...