Posted on 01/30/2019 3:20:46 AM PST by vannrox
Ultima Thule as imaged by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Image Credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
The most detailed image of Ultima Thule returned by New Horizons reveals surface details, including pits on both the object’s lobes and contrasting patterns of darkness and light in various regions.
Taken by the wide-angle Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), part of the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument, this latest image, sent back on January 18-19, has a resolution of 440 feet (135 meters) per pixel. It was taken at 12:26 am EST on January 1, just seven minutes before closest approach, from a distance of 4,200 miles (6,700 km).
Mission scientists enhanced the image in a process known as deconvolution, to bring out the details on Ultima Thule’s surface. Near the object’s terminator, the line that separates its day and night sides, many small pits estimated to have diameters of 0.4 miles (0.7 km) are visible. These could be either impact craters or the results of collapses caused by the venting of organic molecules in the KBO’s earliest days.
Contrasting regions of dark and light are present on both of Ultima’s lobes, with the brightest being the neck that holds them together. While the cause of these patterns remains unknown, scientists think they could yield information about Ultima Thule’s origin and the merger of its two lobes.
On the smaller lobe, a round feature that appears to be a crater with a diameter of approximately four miles (seven km) is visible.
“This new image is starting to reveal differences in the geologic character of the two lobes of Ultima Thule, and is presenting us with new mysteries as well. Over the next month, there will be better color and better resolution images that we hope will help unravel the many mysteries of Ultima Thule,” mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said.
Because New Horizons is about 4.13 billion miles (6.64 billion km) from Earth, signals traveling at the universal speed of light take six hours and nine minutes each way. Return of all the data collected during the New Year’s flyby will take a total of 20 months.
Could be an old abandoned death star...
So Ultima Thule is about 20 miles through its longitudinal axis and about 12 miles wide through its lower, wider lobe. The small lobe appears to be about 8 miles wide. Just trying to provide a sense of scale here.
It must be large enough to have some gravity.
If nuclear fusion gets figured out then in a few hundred years this rock would make a nice colony if hollowed out.
Sign me up! You goinn’? ( grin)
An astral snowman.
Cool... Thanks! I was looking forward to seeing the better pics of it. Looks like two that somehow got fused together.
Bkmk
That’s a potato
[ Sign me up! You goinn’? ( grin) ]
tell me about it, an off planet colony would be a welcome change of pace from all the crap going on earth right now.
Yeah, that was my first thought! Kinda' spooky looking...
Cule
It is another testimony to the superior quality of J B Weld. That stuff works on everything!
I wish the space agency that once depended on people like Walter Dornberger and Warner Von Braun (both former Nazi SS officers) had not named this thing “Ultima Thule”. The damned Thule society was the philosophical founder of the Nazi Party. Those a-holes pushed the world into the most violent war in human history. NASA should have known better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Greek, Roman, and famous poem (Dream Land) by Edgar Allen Poe.
Gravitational attraction caused the lobes to impact and join through the process of gravitaational accreetion.
The Higgs Boson is large enough to have its own gravity.
Pretty heavy stuff.
Everything has gravity.
I thought this was a ‘family’ website :P
Damn, I thought Ultima Thule was a supermodel from Finland.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.