Space probe New Horizons, last in the news during its 2015 Pluto flyby is fast approaching distance space object Ultima Thule aka 2014 MU69. It is about 12 to 22 miles wide with a darkish complexion.
33 minutes past midnight on New Years Day (Eastern Time) the probe will woosh past at its closest point, 2200 miles away from the asteroid or rather the “Kuiper Belt Object”. Report comes in about 9 hours later, touch wood.
This thread is for comments, questions and general Dopesplaining.
Wikipedia on Thule: Thule was the place located furthest north, which was mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature and cartography.
In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin “furthermost Thule”) acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world”.[2]
By the late middle ages and early modern era, the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland.[3] By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.[4][5]
In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen established a missionary and trading post in north-western Greenland, which he named “Thule” (later Qaanaaq).
Modern interpretations of the ancient Greek and Roman place name have included Orkney, Shetland, the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in Estonia,[6][7] and the Norwegian island of Smøla.[8] Thule - Wikipedia
Yep, the bloody thing hooned past me only last week going like the clappers, with it’s lights on high beam, chucking donuts and slewing all over the space lanes with Born in the USA blaring from the boom box. Big Brother is going to be mightily pissed if they try that malarkey on him.
I am a tad disappointed in the direction it is headed, but maybe it lacks some of the specific instruments for what interests me. We need a probe that can go very fast in the other direction, to gather information on the structure of the heliotail, if there is such a thing. Hard sell, that, though.
Despite what that Washington Post article suggests, this rock did not form in the part of the Solar System it’s currently in. It almost certainly formed somewhere much closer to the Sun and, due to interactions with the giant planets, migrated out there.
That’s true of everything that far out. The Solar Nebula, a disk of gas and dust around the proto-Sun, was way too thin that far away from the Sun for large objects (meaning anything larger than a grain of sand) to form. So comets, Kuiper Belt Objects, and Oort Cloud objects, even Neptune and Uranus, all came from closer in.
New Horizons will create about 50 Gigabytes of data during the flyby, which will be broadcast to Earth through September 2020. As for the nearer future: The resolution will improve each day, so you can watch as Ultima Thule is transformed from a barely resolved object into a new world never seen before.** In the images posted on Jan. 1, Ultima is expected to be approximately 3 pixels across, but it will grow to approximately 100 pixels across for the images posted on Jan. 2**, and approximately 200 pixels across for the images posted on Jan. 3.
The team will continue posting LORRI images within 24 hours of their receipt on the ground during the first two weeks of January 2019, provided NASA has approved their release. After that, images received at the New Horizons Science Operations Center through each Tuesday at 5 pm ET will be posted on the following Friday. The date/time in the image caption is when the picture was taken by the spacecraft, though receipt of the data on Earth could be many days later. Emphasis added.
Hm, looks like the latest images on that page are still 1-2 pixel wide images from 12/31. But this page has a much better resolution image that clearly shows that Ultima Thule is a contact binary (or a giant penis).
