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Ultima Thule

SPACE: Meet Arrokoth, the Most Distant Object Ever Explored

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Arrokoth - Live Science

Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, a term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language, mission team members announced today (Nov. 12). “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “That desire to learn is … Read more

SPACE: Ultima Thule is a Frankenstein Beast

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Ultima Thule

Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission scientists shared new data about the space rock’s topography and composition, which is helping them to refine scenarios about how the object formed. “Every single observation that we planned worked as planned,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research … Read more

SPACE: Ultima Thule Looks Like a Snowman

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Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Jan. 1. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was two bodies that got stuck together, what they call a contact binary. “Two completely separate objects that are now joined together,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. Full Story at the New York Times