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 ...
I know.
Were it to happen again, I don’t think there’d be any hiding it like the kooks theorize.
I know.
Were it to happen again, I don’t think there’d be any hiding it like the kooks theorize.
The snowman.
Second time tonight the mobile device has better and double posted.
Think I’ll give up for now.
I can tell you know it
You just explained it all very well even for a layman with public college Liberal Arts BA to grasp
Thank u
They did a remarkable job, analogous to threading a needle in a haystack with another, finer needle, from a different county.
I’m beyond impressed with what they’ve managed to accomplish. When you think of the scale, it’s almost beyond comprehension.
That’s one heck of a team!
Those four light spots in each quadrant of the larger image look like where the legs of the beast got ripped out.
This type of thing, and much less for that matter, was quite exciting in the 50’s, but after Star Trec, meh. Hollywood has been ruining things a long time.
Alrighty. Talk later, bro.
All the space sruff is fake. NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing and he did an excellent job, even shooting on location to get it just right. Oh wait..
It originally said “burped” but the autocorrect decided “hey, this word starts with b.”
I hate tech that decides it knows better than you do.
The Earth did suffer massive bombardments of asteroids and comets in the past, but this happened billions of years ago, whereas the most recent ice started ending roughly 12,000 years ago.
Van Allen bookmark
A useful post, lately I’ve been running into a curious number of “Moon landings were faked, Van Allen Belts would have killed everyone and destroyed electronics” claims.
Conspiracy theories, like rust, never sleep.
” Avoid name calling. Act like rational grown ups.”
“My supposition is that NASA is lying to us.”
As fine an example of cognitive dissonance as can be found.
Ultima Thule Already Puzzling New Horizon Researchers, Before We’ve Even Arrived
By Joel Hruska on December 27, 2018
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/282872-ultima-thule-already-puzzling-new-horizon-researchers-before-weve-even-arrived
It looks like no more pictures for a while.
From todays press briefing:
“Data transmission from New Horizons will pause for about a week while the spacecraft passes behind the sun as seen from here on Earth. Data transmission resumes Jan. 10, starting a 20-month download of the spacecraft’s remaining scientific treasures.”
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php
It will be interesting to see how well the two are bound when we see the close-up images - - provided New Horizons passed at the right angle to get a good look at where they connect. Getting antsy to see those close-ups! LOL!
They've learned a few things about UT the past day .....
•Initial data analysis has found no evidence of rings or satellites larger than one mile in diameter orbiting Ultima Thule.
•Data analysis has also not yet found any evidence of an atmosphere.
•The color of Ultima Thule matches the color of similar worlds in the Kuiper Belt, as determined by telescopic measurements.
•The two lobes of Ultima Thule — the first Kuiper Belt contact binary visited — are nearly identical in color. This matches what we know about binary systems which haven't come into contact with each other, but rather orbit around a shared point of gravity.
..... and I look forward to seeing what more they learn as the data comes in over the next several months.
Just last night I happened upon a program that brought to light the recent discovery of a gigantic impact crater on Greenland that may have been responsible for ending the last ice age.
Search on Hiawatha Glacier, or Hiawatha Crater for in-depth information about it.
In a nutshell, the crater is as wide as the city of Paris. The impactor itself is estimated to have been a mile in diameter, and five cubic miles in volume.
"Scientists have discovered a 31km wide impact crater beneath the Hiawatha glacier in Greenland. The discovery, published in Science Advances, was made using airborne radar surveys which unveiled a circular bedrock depression beneath the ice.The presence of quartz and other grains and features on the ground helped the team confirm the finding – these showed signs of having been subjected to large shock pressures. Analysis of the grains also shows that the impact was most likely made by an iron meteorite more than 1km wide. It would have occurred during the Pleistocene, between about 12,000 and 3m years ago."
Huge crater discovered in Greenland – here’s how the impact may have wiped out the mammoths
The Earth did suffer massive bombardments of asteroids and comets in the past, but this happened billions of years ago, whereas the most recent ice started ending roughly 12,000 years ago.
That probably refers to the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment -- besides the recently identified Greenland impact you mentioned, epic impacts have occurred a number of times even since the Chicxulub impact that ended the Cretaceous, two that come to mind (thanks to the late Eugene Shoemaker) are the Ries Basin impact and the Meteor Crater impact.
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