NASA's New Horizons mission reveals entirely new kind of world
Scientists from NASA's New Horizons
mission released the first detailed images of the most distant object ever
explored -- the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Its remarkable
appearance, unlike anything we've seen before, illuminates the processes that
built the planets four and a half billion years ago.
"This
flyby is a historic achievement," said New Horizons Principal Investigator
Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
"Never before has any spacecraft team tracked down such a small body at
such high speed so far away in the abyss of space. New Horizons has set a new
bar for state-of-the-art spacecraft navigation."
The
new images -- taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on
approach -- revealed Ultima Thule as a "contact binary," consisting
of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 19 miles (31
kilometers) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere "Ultima"
(12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere "Thule" (9
miles/14 kilometers across).
The
team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way
back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in
a fender-bender.
"New
Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar
system. We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary
formation, frozen in time," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and
Geophysics team lead. "Studying Ultima Thule is helping us understand how
planets form -- both those in our own solar system and those orbiting other
stars in our galaxy."
Data
from the New Year's Day flyby will continue to arrive over the next weeks and
months, with much higher resolution images yet to come.
"In
the coming months, New Horizons will transmit dozens of data sets to Earth, and
we'll write new chapters in the story of Ultima Thule -- and the solar
system," said Helene Winters, New Horizons Project Manager.
The
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built
and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San
Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science
planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
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