Do more with one link - claim and personalize your FREE link today! Effortlessly schedule, video meet, message chat, network, share materials, e-sign, etc – all in one spot. Collaborate, Nurture connections, Improve client services, Expedite deal closures, and more. 💼 Join FREE!!

Recent Comments

    NASA’s New Horizons Mission reveals entirely new kind of world

    January 4, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Spread the love
    1       
      
    three views of the object showing how color data was overlaid on a higher resolution view to create the color view
    The first color image of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers) at 4:08 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, 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.
    Source: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
    Published: January 2, 2019
    Historical Date: January 1, 2019

    Images of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule unveil the very first stages of solar system’s history. 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% 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. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190102

    Tags:  , ,

    Related Posts: