Meet Ultima AND Thule: First high-resolution images of most distant object ever visited

The Daily Mail ^ | 1/2/19 | Cheyenne MacDonald

[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.

[SunkenCiv]

links to a couple of topics about the Greenland impact:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2749085/posts?page=77#77

[Republican Wildcat]

even shooting on location to get it just right

That's the most clever way of making something fake look real.

[Republican Wildcat]

That was a real live one...

No rockets have ever made it to space and they just crash into the ocean. So that GPS in the car using satellite technology is also faking it...as well as signals beamed to radio and TV stations for broadcast.

[Republican Wildcat]

I realize you have been zotted already, but seriously:

There are no “satellites.”

Really? So that GPS in the car is faking it? Satellite dishes aren't really getting the signal you are watching on the television - you are hallucinating when seeing those images and hearing those sounds, and everyone around you has exactly the same ones? We don't actually gather intelligence from spy satellites? There is no Google Earth, etc.?

Its purpose is to hide the fact that the God of the Bible created Earth and everything associated with it.

How does acknowledging the existence of things such as satellites have to do with that one way or the other?

[chimera]

That’s what I have always wondered about people who say things like this. How in the world can the existence of God be “threatened” by things like satellites or even manned exploration of space? God created all of it. He’s bigger than anything we can ever do. Man-made objects and human endeavors will never threaten God’s existence, or “hide” the truth of it. If those things cause you to doubt your belief in God’s existence, then your faith is somewhat shallow and weak.

[Reily]

And I thought Ned Ludd was dead!

[samtheman]

Best Opus of 2019

And though the year is young, the bar has now been set quite high.

Question for consideration: will the late, not-so-great, TruthInThoughtWordAndDeed still be the Opus Record Holder on December 31st of this year?

[PapaBear3625]

My hats off you you. You barking moonbat troll.

My impression is that TruthInThoughtWordAndDeed was a Leftist troll, doing a caricature of a Christian in order to make FR look silly.

[mrsmith]

“no more pictures for a while”

Thanks. been looking for more detailed pics.
Guess it will be a while.

[COBOL2Java]

I thought the government shutdown was going to keep the images from being received.

Bronco Bama would have pulled the plug on all the equipment until the shutdown was over. Then he'd blame the Republicans for the lost signals.

[COBOL2Java]

For those of you who believe the words our heavenly Father left for us in His Bible, a love letter to His children, may He bless you abundantly in this life and the next.

For the rest of you, there is still time to change your mind.

Blessings to all of you and your loved ones.

[EVO X]

Downloads start sometime on the 10th. I would think we should see some new material by this weekend.

[Paul R.]

There's a great deal of geologic evidence that points to the fact that Earth has suffered major bombardments from asteroids or comets before. It's even theorized that one of those heavy bombardments ended the last ice age. (Windflier)

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. (Simon Green)

Strictly speaking, the Earth is presently in a many millions of years long Ice Age dominated by periods of extensive glaciation, said glacial periods interrupted regularly but briefly by warmer "interglacial" periods. Until the ice at the Earth's poles melts, and stays that way for at least a minimum of one full cycle (over 100k years), or the poles' ice melts and it can somehow be proven the poles will stay that way for those 100k years (at least) or more, then we are still in an Ice Age. Per this sort of (strict) definition of "Ice Age", Windflier may be correct.