NASA Releases Close up Images of “Snowman”
Its shape is odd and the scientists described this feature as ‘contact binary’, which indicates that it is formed as two spherical rocks, slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system.
The most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft is a reddish, snowman-shaped rock, 4 billion miles from Earth. The object is now named Ultima Thule and was photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during a late night encounter on the first day of 2019. Ultima Thule is the first inhabitant of the Kuiper belt, the ring of rocky relics that surrounds the outer solar system, which scientists have seen from such a close quarter.
Its shape is odd and the scientists described this feature as ‘contact binary’, which indicates that it is formed as two spherical rocks, slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system. This finding also supports a theory of planet formation that suggests the world is born from slow accumulation, rather than catastrophic collisions. So Ultima Thule is going to reveal many unknown facts about our solar system.
Cathy Olkin, Deputy project scientist of the mission said, “This is exactly what we need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward. Ultima is telling us about our evolutionary history”.
After the New Horizon’s encounter with Ultima Thule, it took six hours for signals to reach Earth at the speed of light. While, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where New Horizons is operated, were working to transform those bits of data into the first high-resolution image of the Kuiper belt object. The black and white photo was taken from about 30,000 miles away, as New Horizons sped toward its target at 32,000 miles per hour.
Principal Investigator Alan Stern said it was a “Spectacular moment”, while displaying the early images from the flyby. He said, “That’s elation, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg”.
Jeff Moore, New Horizons geology team lead, said Ultima Thule is formed in the first few million years of the solar system from a collection of smaller objects. Over time, dust and pebbles clumped together to form the object’s two lobes, which eventually combined to form a single body. But unlike other planets, which have undergone dramatic geologic change and which are heated and transformed by the sun, Ultima Thule has existed in a ‘deep freeze’ since it first formed, 4.6 billion years ago.
Moore said, “What we think we're looking at is the end product of a process that took place at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system”. He also called New Horizons “a time machine”, capable of taking scientists back to the moment of our origins. Now, it will take nearly 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during a brief encounter with Ultima Thule.