Pretty amazing that this happened yesterday and Nova has a special about it. Very cool to watch. Enjoy! NOVA Pluto and Beyond Season 46 Episode 1 | 52m 57s Since it explored Pluto in 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has been zooming toward NASA’s most distant target yet. Join the mission team as the probe attempts to fly by Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from Earth. Aired: 01/02/19 Expires: 01/30/19 Rating: TV-PG https://www.pbs.org/video/pluto-and-beyond-gwcrnv/
Nasa's New Horizons: 'Snowman' shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed The small, icy world known as Ultima Thule has finally been revealed. A new picture returned from Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft shows it to be two objects joined together - to give a look like a "snowman". The US probe's images acquired as it approached Ultima hinted at the possibility of a double body, but the first detailed picture from Tuesday's close flyby confirms it. New Horizons encountered Ultima 6.5 billion km from Earth. The event set a record for the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. The previous mark was also set by New Horizons when it flew past the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. But Ultima is 1.5 billion km further out. Nasa probe survives distant flyby Agonising wait for Ultima Thule news Voyager 2 probe 'leaves Solar System' It orbits the Sun in a region of the Solar System known as the Kuiper belt - a collection of debris and dwarf planets. There are hundreds of thousands of Kuiper members like Ultima, and their frigid state almost certainly holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago. The mission team thinks the two spheres that make up this particular object probably joined right at the beginning, or very shortly after. The scientists have decided to call the larger lobe "Ultima", and the smaller lobe "Thule". The volume ratio is three to one. Jeff Moore, a New Horizons co-investigator from Nasa's Ames Research Center, said the pair would have come together at very low speed, at maybe 2-3km/h. He joked: "If you had a collision with another car at those speeds you may not even bother to fill out the insurance forms." The new data from Nasa's spacecraft also shows just how dark the object is. Its brightest areas reflect just 13% of the light falling on them; the darkest, just 6%. That's similar to potting soil, said Cathy Olkin, the mission's deputy project scientist from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). It has a tinge of colour, however. "We had a rough colour from Hubble but now we can definitely say that Ultima Thule is red," added colleague Carly Howett, also from SwRI. "Our current theory as to why Ultima Thule is red is the irradiation of exotic ices." Essentially, its surface has been "burnt" over the eons by the high-energy cosmic rays and X-rays that flood space. Principal Investigator Alan Stern paid tribute to the skill of his team in acquiring the image as New Horizons flew past the object, reaching 3,500km from its surface at closest approach. The probe had to target Ultima very precisely to be sure of getting it centre-frame in the view of the cameras and other instruments onboard. "[Ultima's] only really the size of something like Washington DC, and it's about as reflective as garden variety dirt, and it's illuminated by a Sun that's 1,900 times fainter than it is outside on a sunny day here on the Earth. We were basically chasing it down in the dark at 32,000mph (51,000km/h) and all that had to happen just right," the SwRI scientist said. Less than 1% of all the data gathered by New Horizons during the flyby has been downlinked to Earth. The slow data-rates from the Kuiper belt mean it will be fully 20 months before all the information is pulled off the spacecraft. The best of the pictures shared by the team on Wednesday were taken while the probe was still 28,000km from Ultima and discern surface features larger than 140m across. Pictures are expected in February that were captured at the moment of closest approach and these will have a resolution of about 35m per pixel. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46742298
Queen's Brian May Releases 'New Horizons' Single to Celebrate Epic Flyby New Horizons' flyby of the distant object Ultima Thule now has its own soundtrack. Astrophysicist Brian May, lead guitarist for the band Queen, released a new single called "New Horizons" just after midnight EST (0500 GMT) on New Year's Day to highlight the flyby, which peaked about 30 minutes later when the NASA spacecraft zoomed within 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule. Ultima lies about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth and is now the farthest-flung celestial body ever to be visited by a spacecraft. [New Horizons at Ultima Thule: Full Coverage] "This project made music in my head, and that's what you're hearing," May told reporters on Monday (Dec. 31). "This mission is about human curiosity," he added. "It's about the need of humankind to go out and explore." A brand-new single After its famous flyby of Pluto in July 2015, New Horizons began an extended mission to visit another object in the Kuiper Belt, a band of icy rocks beyond Neptune's orbit. That second target is officially known as 2014 MU69, and has been nicknamed Ultima Thule by the mission team. In visiting one of the most primitive and pristine objects in the solar system's dark outer reaches, New Horizons is probing the building blocks of planets, and the solar system's earliest history. The 22-mile-wide (35 km) Ultima Thule is the first small Kuiper Belt object ever visited. This makes the encounter incredibly intriguing, because "there is nothing more exciting in a world of exploration than going to a place about which you know nothing," May said. "The sky's the limit for what we could find out." According to May, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, called him up to request he write a song for the mission. May said he initially had some reservations. "I thought this was going to be hard, because I can't think of anything that rhymes with Ultima Thule," he said. May said that, as he considered the mission's goals, he began to hear in his head "the music of an object plummeting through space faster than anything before." He realized that, rather than trying to focus on the specifics of the mission itself, he should instead work to incorporate the spirit of exploration embodied by the spacecraft. May sat down with English lyricist Don Black, who penned iconic songs such as "Born Free," which May described as "a very forward-looking song." The next morning, May woke up with what he described as two simple verses in his inbox from Black — verses that inspired him and kicked him into action. Tucked into the new single are quotes from the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking. The song both begins and concludes with those quotes, while a third is tucked in the middle. May played his new single just after midnight on New Year's Day, when it became available on iTunes and various streaming platforms. A YouTube video that May said he and his colleagues made on a "shoestring budget" will also be available, and will also tell the story of the mission team. "This became a song which is an anthem to human endeavor," May said. "The human race explores because it needs to know." https://www.space.com/42875-brian-may-new-horizons-song-ultima-thule-flyby.html
