2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
The team of the automatic interplanetary station New Horizons showed the first clear image of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule, taken 37 hours before the closest approach on January 1, 2019, which confirms the assumptions about the shape of the object, but cannot give an idea of how many bodies are in the system, it is reported on the mission website.
New Horizons is the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto at close range. Thanks to the data collected over several days, astronomers learned that Pluto has cryovolcanoes, glaciers, mountain ranges and signs of a subsurface ocean, and also saw its moons Charon, Nikta, Hydra and Kerber for the first time in detail. It took more than fifteen months to transfer the accumulated information. After the flyby in 2015, the mission's leadership decided to explore the Kuiper belt, located at a distance of 30–55 astronomical units from the Sun, and containing bodies left after the formation of the solar system, in the period from 2016 to 2021. The collected data will help to better understand the composition of the protoplanetary disk and the formation mechanisms of our planetary system.
The device is now on its way to its new target, the 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule (Ultima Thule - the name was given in honor of the mythical island in northern Europe in ancient and medieval literature and cartography), to which it will arrive at the end of December 2018. It is a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt object that orbits the Sun once in 295 years. It is speculated that it may be an ice-rock body, and observations by Hubble have shown that the color of the surface may have a reddish tint. Preliminary estimates of the object's size were initially in the range of 20 to 40 kilometers, but later it was determined that 2014 MU69 is most likely either a close binary system of bodies about 15–20 kilometers in diameter, orbiting a common center of mass; or a highly elongated large body, about thirty kilometers in length.
A new image of 2014 MU69 was obtained using the LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) onboard camera on December 30, 2018, when the probe was at a distance of 1.9 million kilometers from its target. It turned out that the predictions of the size and shape of the object are confirmed - in the image of several frames, subjected to processing, an elongated body is visible, the length of which is approximately twice the width, but whether this is a single object or a binary system is still unclear.
The station will make a 140-second flyby past 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019, at 05:33 GMT, the minimum distance to the object will be about 3500 kilometers, which will provide image resolution up to thirty meters per pixel (twice as high as for images of Pluto's surface). During the rendezvous, the scientific instruments and cameras of the apparatus must show how many bodies the object actually consists of, whether it has a satellite or dust rings, tell about the geological features, topography and composition of the surface and whether they have a gas coma. The transfer of the collected data to Earth will continue until the fall of 2020. At the same time, the study of this object is the central, but not the only task of the apparatus - it will study from a distance about 30 more objects of the Kuiper belt, as well as study the plasma, gaseous and dusty environment around it.
Read more about the discoveries made by the New Horizons apparatus in our material and on a special page.
