New Horizons sweeps past Ultima Thule

[ilan]

New Horizons sweeps past Ultima Thule
Deborah Byrd in SPACE | January 1, 2019

Since its historic encounter with Pluto in 2015, New Horizons has been heading outward. It’s now made history again by sweeping past the most distant object yet visited by a spacecraft from Earth.

Left, a composite of 2 images taken via New Horizons. Scientists say it provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it’s approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 km by 16 km). Right, an artist’s concept of one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Image via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane.

The New Year has brought with it a couple of astounding new space records. On December 31, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully moved into orbit around the smallest space body yet, a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Just hours later, in the early hours of New Year’s Day according to clocks in the Americas, the New Horizons spacecraft – also a NASA craft, launched from Earth in 2006 and made famous in 2015 for its once-in-a-lifetime encounter with Pluto – made history again with the most distant spacecraft encounter yet. New Horizons swept past an object in the Kuiper Belt – known as Ultima Thule – on January 1, 2019 at 06:33 UTC (12:33 a.m. EST).

Signals confirming the spacecraft had survived the encounter and had filled its digital recorders with science data on Ultima Thule reached the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland almost exactly 10 hours later, at 14:29 UTC (10:29 a.m. EST).

It took that long for New Horizons to send back its data from this distant object, some 4 billion miles from our sun.
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The image of Ultima Thule was taken from a long ways off, but it was the first image. New images in the near future will be much closer and better resolved. - ilan