Posted on 12/19/2018 6:36:42 AM PST by C19fan
At the furthest reaches of the solar system, 2019 will start off with exploration. NASA has given the final green light to its New Horizons spacecraft for a January 1st flyby of Ultima Thule, an object in the Kuiper Belt around a billion miles beyond Pluto. It will be the most distant planetary flyby in human history.
Before giving the okay, NASA wanted to make sure that it wasn't passing up any other opportunities for either study or disaster in the area—rings, small moons, and anything else that a probe like New Horizons might want to observe. Pushing through the vast expanse of space at 31,500 MPH (50,700 KMH), even the tiniest unexpected ice or dust particle could render the piano-sized craft inoperable.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home another glimpse of the distant, icy body it will zoom past just three weeks from now.
The small object Ultima Thule swims amid a sea of distant stars in the new composite photo, which New Horizons snapped with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera at around midnight EST (0500 GMT) on Dec. 1.
At the time, the probe was 24 million miles (38.7 million kilometers) from Ultima and more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth, mission team members said. [NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]
https://www.space.com/42679-new-horizons-ultima-thule-photo.html
Rendering of Ultima Thule with scale The New Horizons team used the Hubble Space Telescope to search for the next Kuiper Belt object to fly by after Pluto.
Using observations made with Hubble on June 26, 2014, the science team discovered an object that New Horizons could reach with its available fuel. The object was subsequently designated 2014 MU69, given the minor planet number 485968, and based on public votes, nicknamed “Ultima Thule”, which means “beyond the known world”.
Ultima Thule is located in the Kuiper belt in the outermost regions of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune. In the early morning of January 1st 2019 Eastern Time, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Ultima Thule at a distance of 3500 km (2200 miles).
At this time, Ultima Thule will be at a distance of almost 6.5 billion km (4 billion miles) from the Sun, making this the most distant planetary flyby that has yet been attempted, and the first time that a Solar System object of this type has been seen close-up.
Ultima Thule measures approximately 30 km in diameter, and is irregularly shaped. In July 2017, Ultima Thule passed in front of a star as seen from Earth (a stellar occultation), allowing astronomers to determine that its shape is most likely a contact binary (two bodies that are touching) or a close binary system (two objects that are orbiting each other). An artist’s impression of Ultima Thule as a contact binary is shown in the accompanying picture.
We will only know what Ultima Thule’s surface looks like once New Horizons has sent back the first pictures after it has flown by, although based on observations of similar-sized Solar System objects, it will almost certainly display impact craters. The lighting environment at its surface is very dim, as it receives only about 0.05% of the light from the Sun that Earth does. We do know that Ultima Thule has a reddish color, probably caused by exposure of hydrocarbons to sunlight over billions of years. The flyby will also reveal whether it has any moons, or even a ring system.
Ultima Thule belongs to a class of Kuiper belt objects called the “cold classicals”, which have nearly circular orbits with low inclinations to the solar plane, and which have not been perturbed since their formation perhaps 4.6 billion years ago. Ultima Thule will therefore be the most primitive planetary object yet explored, and will reveal to us what conditions were like in this distant part of the Solar System as it condensed from the solar nebula.
“Ultima Thule” is the name the Romans gave to the remote Scottish Island of St. Kilda.
“The Edge Of The World”.
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Those proton storms can be dangerous.
Wonder what the baud rate and packet size are on that device?
I’m guessing it’s just a big rock, no big deal.
Planet potato!
Maybe they will find Obola’s college transcripts up there.
I’m betting it’s going to be peanut shaped.
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