{"id":18132,"date":"2019-02-22T18:01:54","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T10:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/ultimate-ultima-new-horizons-team-shares-sharpest-view-of-space-snowman\/"},"modified":"2019-02-22T18:01:54","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T10:01:54","slug":"ultimate-ultima-new-horizons-team-shares-sharpest-view-of-space-snowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/ultimate-ultima-new-horizons-team-shares-sharpest-view-of-space-snowman\/","title":{"rendered":"Ultimate Ultima: New Horizons team shares sharpest view of space snowman"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_481993\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-481993\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-481993\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman-630x630.png\" alt=\"2014 MU69\" width=\"630\" height=\"630\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman-630x630.png 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman-768x768.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman-100x100.png 100w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/190222-snowman.png 985w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-481993\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The most detailed images of a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule \u2014 obtained just minutes before the spacecraft\u2019s closest approach \u2014 have a resolution of about 110 feet per pixel. This processed, composite picture combines nine individual images taken with the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. The image was taken at 12:26 a.m. ET Jan. 1, when the spacecraft was 4,109 miles from 2014 MU69 and 4.1 billion miles from Earth. (NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI \/ NOAO Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The scientists behind NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft have released the sharpest possible view of the mission\u2019s latest target, a smooshed-in cosmic snowman known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule.<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons captured gigabytes\u2019 worth of imagery and data as it flew past the icy object, more than 4 billion miles from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of primordial material on the edge of our solar system. It\u2019s taken weeks to send back detailed data for processing, but now the team says they\u2019ve gotten the best close-up view of Ultima that they\u2019ll ever get.<\/p>\n<p>The best pictures were taken from a distance of 4,109 miles, just six and a half minutes before the time of closest approach at 12:33 a.m. ET Jan. 1 (9:33 p.m. PT Dec. 31). By processing multiple images, the team was able to sharpen image resolution to about 110 feet per pixel.<\/p>\n<p>Principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said the imaging campaign hit the \u201cbull\u2019s-eye.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGetting these images required us to know precisely where both tiny Ultima and New Horizons were \u2014 moment by moment \u2013 as they passed one another at over 32,000 miles per hour in the dim light of the Kuiper Belt, a billion miles beyond Pluto,\u201d Stern said today in a news release.&nbsp;\u201cThis was a much tougher observation than anything we had attempted in our 2015 Pluto flyby.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Flying by Ultima\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ljk8Wc_MnyA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.75\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"600\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 600px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The processing brings out surface details that weren\u2019t readily apparent in earlier images. Among them are several bright, enigmatic, roughly circular patches of terrain. The picture also provides a better look at dark pits near the boundary between Ultima\u2019s sunlit and shadowed sides.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhether these features are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits, or something entirely different, is being debated in our science team,\u201d John Spencer, deputy project scientist from SwRI, said in the news release.<\/p>\n<p>Stern said some of the surface features suggest that Ultima is \u201cunlike any object ever explored before.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ultima is thought to represent a contact binary object consisting of material that\u2019s been little changed since the early days of the solar system. From a head-on perspective, Ultima looks like two snowballs that have been stuck together to create a 19-mile-tall snowman (or the BB-8 droid from \u201cStar Wars\u201d). But an analysis of image data captured from the side reveals that the two lobes of the object are actually&nbsp;shaped more like a pancake stuck onto the side of a walnut.<\/p>\n<p>Since the New Year\u2019s encounter, New Horizons has traveled tens of millions of miles beyond Ultima. Mission operations manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory reports that the spacecraft is continuing to operate flawlessly.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s expected to take another year and a half to send back all the data that New Horizons collected during the flyby, and by that time the mission team may well have selected another target for the probe to survey in the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_482027\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-482027\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-482027\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/ultimaview-630x354.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"354\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/ultimaview-630x354.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/ultimaview-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/ultimaview-1260x709.jpg 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/ultimaview.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-482027\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">At first, scientists thought the object known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule consisted of two roughly spherical objects stuck together. Further analysis showed that the lobes were shaped more like a walnut and a pancake. (NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most detailed images of a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule \u2014 obtained just minutes before the spacecraft\u2019s closest approach \u2014 have a resolution of about 110 feet per pixel. This processed, composite picture combines nine individual images taken with the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. The image [&hellip;]<\/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":[2337,2173,4809,2174,4810,1563,2937],"class_list":["post-18132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-2014-mu69","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe","tag-solar-system","tag-ultima-thule"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18132"}],"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=18132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}