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 ...
Tin foil
Nutcase
Gobbledygook
Some assembly required.
Uh, no, anyone can slap a logo on a youtube video.
You need to get out of the conspiracy fever swamps. Much more dangerous to your mental health than any Van Allen Belts radiation.
Milspec welding joint.
Ah this is very interesting stuff. Don’t ya think?
Are you capable of answering them?
Are you even aware that my post included questions?
Do I need to be talking to Giorgio Tsoukalos about this?
Somehow your choice in screen names reminds me of the clinton’s choice of calling their co-presidency “the most ethical ever”.
Or perhaps Obama’s choice of calling his “the most transparent ever”.
That's been solved. Avoid them and shield your spacecraft...just like we did when we went to the moon. Even if we fly through them the radiation exposure is minimal due to how little time is spent there. You're been watching WAY too many youtube videos.
From VanAllen belts on Wikipedia:
The Apollo missions marked the first event where humans traveled through the Van Allen belts, which was one of several radiation hazards known by mission planners.[32] The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them. Apollo flight trajectories bypassed the inner belts completely, passing through the thinner areas of the outer belts.[25][33]
dirtboy,
That’s the ticket!
Just discredit a NASA produced video by saying that someone else posted it.
You have run out of ideas.
DouglasKC,
Take it up with NASA. They produced the video.
This Ultima picture is much to do about nothing. Just chunks of asteroid-like rock - what’s the different between this and other asteroids of our solar system. A lot of hoopla (and money), and sound and fury, signifying nothing.
null and void,
Your response is a typical ad hominem attack.
That is what you go to when you have no intelligent response.
Ummm..no, NASA did not "admit" anything. You took what an engineer said out of context and put a spin on it.
THINK. Your whole premise is that NASA is faking all the space stuff. And then you go and say that NASA is admitting we can't go into space. Make up your mind. It's either one or the other.
I’m not sure if that individual is mind-blowingly ignorant, but sincerely believes that crap in good faith or if that individual is simply a liar.
Nothing to take up. You're simply twisting things you don't want to understand.
Dude, it’s obviously not an official NASA video. Anyone can slap a NASA logo on a youtube video.
Aeons ago, for a handful of years,I taught physics, general science, and math in high school. My stock answer to “But Mr. Mountain, why do we have to learn this stuff?” was a cleaned up version of “So be able to recognize and reject BS when you see it on the news”. (This was before the WWW was a thing.) Ignorance of the natural sciences is unnecessary and unfortunate.
It’s hard to know which one of those two things she is oh, but one thing we know for certain, she’s closed minded.
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