As the data collected by the New Horizons probe comes in, more and more is known about Ultima Thule. On Wednesday, January 2, about 12 hours after the ship passed 3,500 kilometers from the center of the object of the Kuiper Belt, the first images of Thule Ultima reached Earth. Ultima Thule thus became the most distant object to have been flown over by a spacecraft.
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| Ultima Thule imaginedin 3D (source:NASA) |
An important scientific discovery
The first is 14 kilometres in diameter and the second is 19 kilometres. The star has much to tell us about the processes, by accretion, of the birth of planets. "We are witnessing a physical representation of the beginning of the planetary formation frozen in time," explains Jeff Moore, who leads the mission's geology and geophysics team. "New Horizons is like a time machine that takes us back to the birth of the Solar System. Stowed in a cool place in the Kuiper belt, more than 6 billion kilometers from Earth, Ultima Thule has not changed much since 4.6 billion years. Its surface reflects as much light as "the earth in your garden", and the Sun's rays are 1,600 times weaker than on Earth, he said to indicate the difficulty of locating and studying such an object, at the confines of the solar system, far beyond Pluto.
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| Pictures of Ultima Thule (Source:NASA) |
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| Ultima Thule in high resolution (source:NASA) |
The probe path
The New Horizons probe was launched on January 19, 2006 from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida. The spacecraft crossed the Moon's orbit 8 hours and 35 minutes after launch, and then continued its journey, crossing the orbit of Mars on April 6, 2006, before flying over Jupiter on February 28, 2007. New Horizons also had the opportunity to photograph Jupiter satellites as Europe. It is finally on July 14, 2015 at 11:59 UTC that the probe passes as close as possible to Pluto at 11,095 km at a relative speed of 13.78 km/s. On January 9, 2019, the switch from 3-axis to rotation mode will take place. The MU69 2014 flight will be completed and will mark the beginning of the phase of transferring most of the probe's data. For the time being, the New Horizons mission could continue in the Kuiper Belt in the 2020s. The probe should also take as its last shot the Earth, which would be taken from this distant area.
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| Alan Stern thanks his team (source:nasa) |
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