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As expected, the New Horizons spacecraft conducted on January 1, 2019 the historical overview of the MU69 2014 object, also known as Ultima Thule. The probe is equipped with cameras and sensors. The first data and official images will be available soon, but the communication channel with the device is already open and working properly, according to an official statement from NASA. However, the vastness of the data collected will take up to 20 months to reach the Earth.
In September 2020, when New Horizons will be well away from the Kuiper Belt, towards the constellation Sagittarius, we will know everything. possible on the mysterious object. Whatever the case may be, with this overview, we can learn more about the object discovered in 2014 that recalls the formation of the solar system. Ultimate Thule is the most distant object ever explored with a human-made probe.
And Brian May, Queen's guitarist and astrophysicist, has released a song commemorating this new NASA feat with the video you can. check below:
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The Ultima Thule is 6.4 billion kilometers from Earth and the first real images of the object are expected to arrive later this Tuesday ( 1). We can wait until the next few days for the first photographs of this small world confirming (or suddenly refuting) the suspicion that the object has a rather curious format, as if it were two objects "stuck" or suddenly. , two objects that revolve around a very short distance. With the first batch of data already badyzed, NASA claims that the object as a whole has the shape of a bowling keel, rotating end-to-end, with a dimension of about 32 km / 16 km.
Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission (who studied Pluto and his moons in 2015) pointed out that "the object is in such a freeze that it has been perfectly preserved since its initial formation. its geology, as it was originally created, that it has satellites, an atmosphere, etc., will tell us about the initial conditions of the formation of objects in our system. "
New Horizons is to collect 900 images of Ultima Thule, and images with the highest possible resolution will arrive within three days. By the way, the resolution of photos taken with this object will be three times greater than that of Pluto's photos, as the ship will be able to approach it even more than it has been. with the dwarf planet.
NASA aired a YouTube live on Tuesday (1) showing the first results of the periphery of the solar system. You can watch the broadcast recording in the video below:
Source: NASA
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