First Profile Of Distant And Silent Ultima Thule Published By New Horizons Team

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – The first profile of the Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69 – widely known as (dubbed Ultima Thule) has been published by NASA’s New Horizons mission team.

Ultima Thule is the farthest (four billion miles from Earth) world ever explored by humans.

The initial data reveal much about the object’s development, geology and composition. It’s a contact binary, with two distinctly differently shaped lobes.

Ultima ThuleThis composite image of the primordial contact binary Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule) –  compiled from data obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by the object on Jan. 1, 2019. The image combines enhanced color data (close to what the human eye would see) with detailed high-resolution panchromatic pictures. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko

At about 22 miles (36 kilometers) long, Ultima Thule consists of a large, strangely flat lobe (nicknamed “Ultima”) connected to a smaller, somewhat rounder lobe (nicknamed “Thule”), at a juncture nicknamed “the neck.”

How the two lobes got their unusual shape is an unanticipated mystery that likely relates to how they formed billions of years ago.

“We’re looking into the well-preserved remnants of the ancient past,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said in a press release.

“There is no doubt that the discoveries made about Ultima Thule are going to advance theories of solar system formation.”

New Horizons team are also investigating a range of surface features on Ultima Thule, such as bright spots and patches, hills and troughs, and craters and pits on Ultima Thule.

The largest depression is a 5-mile-wide (8-kilometer-wide) feature the team has nicknamed Maryland crater – which likely formed from an impact. Some smaller pits on the Kuiper Belt object, however, may have been created by material falling into underground spaces, or due to exotic ices going from a solid to a gas (called sublimation) and leaving pits in its place.

In color and composition, Ultima Thule resembles many other objects found in its area of the Kuiper Belt.

It’s very red – redder even than much larger, 1,500-mile (2,400-kilometer) wide Pluto, which New Horizons explored at the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt in 2015 – and is in fact the reddest outer solar system object ever visited by spacecraft.

Data transmission from the flyby continues, and will go on until the late summer 2020. In the meantime, New Horizons continues to carry out new observations of additional Kuiper Belt objects it passes in the distance.

The New Horizons spacecraft is now 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth, operating normally and speeding deeper into the Kuiper Belt at nearly 33,000 miles (53,000 kilometers) per hour.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer