Posted on 01/02/2019 1:24:00 PM PST by Simon Green
Humanity has captured its first clear look at an object in the faraway Kuiper Belt.
NASA revealed the first images and science data from this week's historic flyby in a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Far from the blurry 'bowling pin' we saw with New Horizons' first look when it beamed its signal home early morning on January 1, the new images reveal Ultima Thule is snowman-shaped red world with two distinct lobes - one stacked atop the other.
This arrangement is what's known as a contact binary, the experts say – and, it’s now the first a spacecraft has ever explored.
Photographing Ultima Thule – and traveling more than four billion miles through space to get there – is a ‘technical success beyond anything ever attempted before in spaceflight,’ Principal Investigator Alan Stern said in a press conference Wednesday.
'It's really only the size of Washington D.C., and about as reflective as garden variety dirt,' Stern explained, noting that the object wasn't even known to the world prior to the summer of 2014.
'We were ultimately chasing it down in the dark at 32,000 miles per hour.'
The best images of the new batch were captured when New Horizons was about 17,000 miles (27, 000 kilometers) from Ultima Thule.
And, the pictures will only get better from here.
The scientists say the two lobes of Ultima Thule came together in a 'gentle' accretion process, with two objects bound together by each other's gravity.
The primitive world was 'born' this way, and did not evolve or deform through external processes to take on the strange shape, the team explains.
'New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system,'said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and Geophysics team lead.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Count on it
how interesting
Another thing (in a long list) that Space:1999 got wrong.
Eagles are still cool though.
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I'm always amazed at the effort some FReepers expend in broadcasting their self-imposed ignorance...
Stupidity makes one neither holy nor righteous.
TXnMA
They were just getting warmed up. Check out post 84.
It’s a Super Mr. Potato-Head doll. Damned, Mattel really knows how to make things that last. A real collector’s piece.
#11. Uma Thurman was NEVER flat. It’s a lie perpetrated by the Flat Una Thurman Double Secret Society.
Even the Flat Earth Society think they are nuts.
#18. No. It’s the stone creature in “Galaxy Quest”.
And to think I cried while playing the first broadcast from space of Apollo 8 as it orbited the Moon and observed the first Earthrise while each of the crew read several verses from Genesis Chapter One. It happened 50 years ago, one of the greatest moments in human history, and those brave men gave credit to their Creator.
Actually we got a pretty good image of Ultima's shadow in 2017 when it eclipsed a star using an array of telescopes many miles apart.
"Hope she's good looking! I hear she's got an hourglass figure."
So you’re a biblical literalist? Why didn’t you just say that to begin with?
I would have left you to your beliefs, and refrained from having this conversation to begin with.
Well now.
It seems that Truth has met up with a higher power.. ;-)
“This account has been banned or suspended.”
How long before his/her/its backup persona is zotted?
Presumed alter ego is still posting this nonsense..
“This account has been banned or suspended.”
Interesting. Obviously there's more to that one than meets the eye.
Was there CGI in the 60’s?
THANK YOU! That troll was beyond annoying.
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