{"id":13418,"date":"2019-01-01T20:22:29","date_gmt":"2019-01-01T12:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/new-horizons-scientists-elated-as-ultima-thules-shape-comes-into-view\/"},"modified":"2019-01-01T20:22:29","modified_gmt":"2019-01-01T12:22:29","slug":"new-horizons-scientists-elated-as-ultima-thules-shape-comes-into-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/new-horizons-scientists-elated-as-ultima-thules-shape-comes-into-view\/","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons scientists elated as Ultima Thule\u2019s shape comes into view"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons\u2019 high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule\u2019s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist\u2019s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima\u2019s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LAUREL, Maryland \u2014 A fresh image from NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft released Tuesday showed the mission\u2019s distant flyby target a billion miles beyond Pluto \u2014 nicknamed Ultima Thule \u2014 has an elongated shape like that of a peanut shell or a bowling pin, and the prospect of higher-resolution pictures arriving on Earth later in the day had scientists salivating for more.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know about all of you, but I\u2019m really liking this 2019 thing so far,\u201d said Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission\u2019s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cWe\u2019re here to tell you that last night, overnight, the United States spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly. Thousands of operations on board the spacecraft had to work correctly in order for us to be able to tell you this, and now we know that it all did.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Horizons phoned home hours after its encounter with Ultima Thule, and the ground team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory here confirmed the first signals from the probe since the flyby arrived on Earth at 10:31 a.m. EST (1531 GMT) Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Subsystems aboard New Horizons looked good at first check, including the probe\u2019s solid state recorders, indicating the spacecraft gathered the data intended during the flyby of Ultima Thule, the most distant planetary body ever explored up-close by a space mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a healthy spacecraft, we\u2019ve just accomplished the most distant flyby,\u201d said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager, known by the acronym MOM.<\/p>\n

An hour later, scientists gathered in a press conference to present a new image of Ultima Thule.<\/p>\n

Stern joked that it\u2019s \u201cOK to laugh\u201d at the blurry image released Tuesday, which was the sharpest view the spacecraft\u2019s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, black-and-white camera obtained of Ultima Thule before zipping past the object at a velocity of more than 32,000 mph (14 kilometers) per second at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s better than the one we had yesterday,\u201d Stern told an auditorium of scientists, reporters and space enthusiasts gathered at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where the New Horizons spacecraft was built and home to the mission control center.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my line of work, we like to interpret even images like this. \u2026 First, we have a better handle on the size of Ultima, it\u2019s about 35 by 15 kilometers (21 miles by 9 miles),\u201d Stern said. \u201cSecondly, you see its irregular shape. There are two possibilities here. One possibility is that it\u2019s bilobate with the upper lobe being smaller than the lower lobe, so they would be asymmetric. Or it may be these are two things that are actually in orbit around each other and just blurred together because of their proximity. Tomorrow, we will know which of those is the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists have already been able to solve one mystery about Ultima Thule, which has an official name of 2014 MU69, designating its discovery by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltima is finally revealing its secrets to us,\u201d said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at APL. \u201cEven though it\u2019s a pixelated blob still, it\u2019s a better pixelated blob than the day before. In fact, these images have allowed us to resolve something that was really puzzling to the scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The axis of Ultima Thule\u2019s rotation appears to be pointing roughly toward the direction of the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s approach, giving it the appearance of spinning like a propeller. That would explain why scientists did not see any significant change in Ultima Thule\u2019s brightness as New Horizons homed in on the distant, icy world, which kept the team from determining its rotation rate.<\/p>\n

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This sequence of three images from New Horizons, received on Dec. 31, taken 70 and 85 minutes apart illustrates the rotation of Ultima Thule. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before Tuesday\u2019s flyby with New Horizons, scientists were uncertain whether Ultima Thule was actually one object, or perhaps two bodies orbiting in close proximity to one another. The latest image suggests it is more likely a single body, but scientists still did not rule out the binary explanation for Ultima Thule\u2019s appearance.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy bet would be it\u2019s probably a single object, it\u2019s bilobate, and if I\u2019m wrong I\u2019ll tell you tomorrow,\u201d Stern said. \u201cIf it\u2019s two separate objects, this would be an unprecedented situation in terms of how close they\u2019re orbiting to one another. It would be spectacular to see, and I\u2019d love to see it, but I think the higher probability is it\u2019s a single body.\u201d<\/p>\n

Better images from the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s LORRI camera should be received by NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network antennas beginning around 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) Tuesday. That communications downlink from New Horizons is expected to last until 6:35 p.m. EST (2335 GMT), according to Bowman, followed by another window to receive signals at 11 p.m. EST (0400 GMT Wednesday).<\/p>\n

The transmissions will take roughly 6 hours and 8 minutes to travel the vast distance between New Horizons and Earth at light speed \u2014 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 kilometers per second.<\/p>\n

The probe\u2019s 15-watt transmitters can beam data down to scientists at 500 to 1,000 bits per second, so it will take 20 months to get all the data and imagery to the ground. The downlink will be interrupted from Jan. 4 until mid-January because New Horizons \u2014 located in the constellation Sagittarius as seen from Earth \u2014 will be too close to the sun in the sky for reliable communications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis mission has always ben about delayed gratification,\u201d Stern said. \u201cIt took us 12 years to sell it (to NASA). It took us five years to build it, and it took us nine years just to get to the first target.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultima Thule is part of the Kuiper Belt, a \u201cthird zone\u201d of the solar system beyond the inner and outer planets, and New Horizons is the first space mission to visit objects residing so far from the sun, following its 2015 first-ever encounter with Pluto and this week\u2019s flyby of Ultima Thule. Ultima Thule takes 298 years to complete one orbit around the sun, and scientists believe it has been in the same region of the solar system since the formation of the planets 4.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

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The Kuiper Belt lies in the so-called \u201cthird zone\u201d of our solar system, beyond the terrestrial planets (inner zone) and gas giants (middle zone). This vast region contains billions of objects, including comets, dwarf planets like Pluto and \u201cplanetesimals\u201d like Ultima Thule. The objects in this region are believed to be frozen in time \u2014 relics left over from the formation of the solar system. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere are really two attributes of Ultima Thule that make it so scientifically valuable for us,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst, because it\u2019s so far from the sun, and the sunlight is so weak out there that the temperatures are down near absolute zero,\u201d he said. \u201cAs a result of that, chemical reactions are essentially frozen, so the object is in such a deep freeze thats it\u2019s perfectly preserved from its original formation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you combine that deep freeze with the fact that Ultima is a small body, only tens of kilometers across, it can\u2019t have a strong geologic engine like Pluto, for example, which is also cold but you could see the activity on its surface and (in) its atmosphere. Ultima doesn\u2019t have the ability to evolve that way.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo everything we\u2019re going to learn about Ultima, from its composition, to its geology, to how it was orginally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere, and those kinds of things, are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system,\u201d Stern said. \u201cAll the other things that we\u2019ve gone out and orbited and flown by and landed on can\u2019t tell us because they\u2019re either large and they evolved, or they\u2019re warm, and they evolved for that reason. Ultima is completely unique.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

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

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons\u2019 high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule\u2019s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist\u2019s […]<\/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-13418","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\/13418"}],"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=13418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}