{"id":13416,"date":"2019-01-02T18:10:37","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T10:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/most-distant-object-ever-visited-resembles-a-snowman\/"},"modified":"2019-01-02T18:10:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T10:10:37","slug":"most-distant-object-ever-visited-resembles-a-snowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/most-distant-object-ever-visited-resembles-a-snowman\/","title":{"rendered":"Most distant object ever visited resembles a snowman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
The Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 \u2014 nicknamed \u201cUltima Thule\u201d \u2014 appears as a dual-lobe contact binary in this photo captured by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft at a distance of around 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers). Credit: NASA\/SWRI\/JHUAPL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LAUREL, Maryland \u2014 The first well-resolved image of the faraway chunk of rock fleetingly visited by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft on New Year\u2019s Day reveals the object \u2014 officially named 2014 MU69 but nicknamed Ultima Thule \u2014 is made of two lobes scientists say came together in an ancient slow-speed collision just as the solar system\u2019s planets were forming.<\/p>\n

Roughly the size of a large metropolitan area, the frozen world located 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) is a relic left over from the birth of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. The plutonium-powered New Horizons spacecraft targeted Ultima Thule after zipping past Pluto in July 2015.<\/p>\n

Scientists revealed the sharpest image of Ultima Thule, nicknamed for an ancient term meaning \u201cbeyond the known world,\u201d in a press conference Wednesday at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory here, where New Horizons was built and home of the mission control center. The new images, taken just before the craft\u2019s closest approach, were the first to reveal details about Ultima Thule\u2019s shape, a day after the previously-best picture only resolved the object as a fuzzy blob.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat image is so 2018,\u201d said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, referring to the New Year\u2019s Eve pre-flyby picture. \u201cMeet Ultima Thule! Just like with Pluto, we could not be happier. What you\u2019re seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by spacecraft. It\u2019s two completely separate objects that are now joined together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bigger of the two lobes has been nicknamed Ultima, and the smaller one Thule, Stern said. The bigger section is around three times the volume of the smaller one.<\/p>\n

Shaped like a charcoal-colored snowman in black-and-white images, Ultima Thule actually appears reddish in color imagery captured by the New Horizons spacecraft, according to Carly Howett, a co-investigator on the mission from the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n

Scientists have also nailed down Ultima Thule\u2019s rotation rate, a basic characteristic that eluded the New Horizons team during the spacecraft\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now know that Ultima rotates with a period of 15 hours, give or take one hour,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, the mission\u2019s deputy project scientist from the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n

Olkin said the object\u2019s rotation axis was tilted about 30 degrees from the spacecraft\u2019s approach vector, meaning much of the same face of Ultima Thule always faced New Horizons as it sped toward the New Year\u2019s Day Encounter.<\/p>\n

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The first color image of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers) at 0408 GMT on Jan. 1, 2019 (11:08 p.m. EST on Dec. 31), highlights its reddish surface. At left is an enhanced color image taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), produced by combining the near infrared, red and blue channels. The center image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has a higher spatial resolution than MVIC by approximately a factor of five. At right, the color has been overlaid onto the LORRI image to show the color uniformity of the Ultima and Thule lobes. Note the reduced red coloring at the neck of the object. Credit: NASA\/SWRI\/JHUAPL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stern said the spacecraft\u2019s one-shot encounter went according to plan, with the probe zooming past Ultima Thule at a distance of around 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on New Year\u2019s Day. He called the flyby \u201ca technical success beyond anything ever attempted before in spaceflight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, Ultima Thule is the most distant planetary body ever explored up-close, and a building block of planetary formation scientists said has been undisturbed for billions of years, holding clues about the conditions in the early solar system.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this spacecraft and this team accomplished is unprecedented,\u201d Stern said Wednesday. \u201cThe object that we rendezvoused with at midnight on New Year\u2019s Day wasn\u2019t even known until the summer of 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s only really the size of something like Washington D.C., and it\u2019s about as reflective as garden variety dirt, and it\u2019s illuminated by a sun that\u2019s 1,900 times fainter than it is outside on a sunny day here on the Earth,\u201d Stern continued. \u201cSo we were basically chasing it down in the dark at 32,000 mph (14 kilometers per second), and all that had to happen just right, as did the entire sequence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results discussed in Wednesday\u2019s press conference are preliminary. According to Stern, far less than 1 percent of the data collected during the flyby has been downlinked to Earth, a time-consuming process expected to take 20 months because of the slow transmission rate over the vast distance to New Horizons.<\/p>\n

Jeff Moore, New Horizons geology and geophysics team lead from NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center, said Ultima Thule likely formed by a low-speed merger between two bodies more than 4 billion years ago, at the earliest stages of the birth of the solar system\u2019s planets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think what we\u2019re looking at is perhaps the most primitive object that has yet been seen by any spacecraft, and may represent a class of objects which are the oldest and most primitive objects that can be seen anywhere in the present solar system,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we think we\u2019re looking at is the end product of a process which probably took place in only a few hundred thousand or maybe a few million years at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system, where initially you have innumerable small particles or pebbles that swirl together into little nodes,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n

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Credit: NASA TV\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through collisions and gravitational interactions, the debris grew into larger clumps, forming the two bodies that make up Ultima Thule, and countless similar objects that formed the planets.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe that\u2019s how Ultima and Thule, as separate objects, formed, and then as the last few bits and pieces of their local swirl are ejected or else collide, the amount of energy that\u2019s still left in the system is so little that the two lobes come together,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n

The two bodies that formed Ultima Thule must have merged at slow speeds \u2014 likely at only a few miles per hour \u2014 to neatly come together without disturbing their individual near-spherical shapes, Moore said.<\/p>\n

Pluto\u2019s small moons are the shard-like leftovers from a violent collision, whereas Ultima Thule\u2019s lobes retain their original shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what we\u2019re looking at is basically the first planetesimals, and these first planetesimals, where they were more commonly found in the inner solar system, came together to form the planets and the moons and everything else we see,\u201d Moore said. \u201cBut these are the only remaining basic building blocks in the backyard of the solar system that everything else we live on, or can see with our telescopes, or visit with our spacecraft, were formed from.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we should think about New Horizons as a time machine, like the \u2018wayback machine\u2019 that we set to time zero that has brought us back to the very beginning of solar system history, to a place where we can observe the most primordial building blocks of the planets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Even better images are expected to be sent back to Earth by New Horizons in the coming weeks, including views from different angles that will help scientists sort out the topography, cratering and roughness of Ultima Thule. At first glance, no obvious craters are visible on the object.<\/p>\n

The first glimpse at Ultima Thule\u2019s chemical composition should be available as soon as Thursday, when scientists plan to hold another press conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just going to get better and better,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

The mission\u2019s chief scientist also addressed a controversy over the nickname Ultima Thule during Wednesday\u2019s press briefing. Ultima Thule\u2019s roots are in Latin, but Nazis used the term to refer to the mythological birthplace of the Aryan race.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think New Horizons is an example, one of the best examples of our time, of raw exploration,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

Stern noted the name\u2019s ancient origins, and called it a \u201cwonderful meme for exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why we chose it,\u201d he said. \u201cJust because some bad guys once liked that term, we\u2019re not going to let them hijack it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Formally known as 2014 MU69, the object\u2019s official name \u2014 and the names of its surface features \u2014 must be approved by the International Astronomical Union, and Stern told reporters there are plans to begin submitting names to the IAU later this year.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 \u2014 nicknamed \u201cUltima Thule\u201d \u2014 appears as a dual-lobe contact binary in this photo captured by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft at a distance of around 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers). Credit: NASA\/SWRI\/JHUAPL LAUREL, Maryland \u2014 The first well-resolved image of the faraway chunk of rock fleetingly visited by NASA\u2019s New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2337,1861,2173,190,2020,2174,1561,2612],"class_list":["post-13416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-2014-mu69","tag-jhuapl","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-nasa","tag-new-frontiers","tag-new-horizons","tag-planetary-science","tag-swri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}