NASA’s New Horizons Mission Reveals Entirely New Kind of World
The first color image of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 137,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) at 4:08 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, highlights its reddish surface. 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 5. At right, the color has been overlaid onto the LORRI image to show the color uniformity of the Ultima and Thule lobes. Credit: NASA/JHU-APL/Southwest Research Institute.
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 4.5 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 27,000 kilometers (17,000 miles) on approach — revealed Ultima Thule as a “contact binary,” consisting of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 31 kilometers (19 miles) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere “Ultima” (19 kilometers/12 miles across) and the smaller sphere “Thule” (14 kilometers/9 miles 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.
For the latest on New Horizons and Ultima Thule, visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.