New Horizons Just Sent Back The First Images of The Mysterious Object It'll Reach on New Years
Last edited Fri Aug 31, 2018, 12:28 AM - Edit history (2)
"We now have Ultima in our sights"
MATT WILLIAMS, THE UNIVERSE TODAY 31 AUG 2018
In July of 2015, NASA's New Horizons mission made history when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a flyby of Pluto.
Since that time, the spacecraft's mission was extended so it could make its way farther into the outer Solar System and become the first spacecraft to explore some Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).
It's first objective will be the KBO known as 2014 MU69, which was recently given the nickname Ultima Thule ("ultima thoo-lee" ) .
Earlier this month (on August 16th), the New Horizons spacecraft managed to capture an image of Ultima Thule for the first time using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-horizons-takes-its-first-image-of-its-next-target-ultima-thule
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When the photos were taken in mid-August, New Horizons had traveled 900 million miles since eye-balling Pluto. Ultima Thuli (aka 2014 MU69) was 100 million miles in the distance. Most importantly, it was where they had calculated it to be.
Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA’s Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team’s first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.
"The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer.”
This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima’s orbit.
The Ultima flyby will be the first-ever close-up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object and the farthest exploration of any planetary body in history, shattering the record New Horizons itself set at Pluto in July 2015 by about 1 billion miles. These images are also the most distant from the Sun ever taken, breaking the record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth taken in 1990. (New Horizons set the record for the most distant image from Earth in December 2017.)
You can see the photos in question in NASA's tweet:
Link to tweet
Artist's rendition of the target object:
