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Jeff Moore, New Horizon Copier and member of NASA's Ames Research Center, reported that the two parties have probably merged at a fairly high speed.
There are hundreds of thousands of bodies like Ultima in Kuiper and they certainly contain clues about the formation of planetary bodies 4.6 billion years ago.
Alan Stern paid tribute to the skills of his team for making the image while the probe was 3,500 km from the object.
The probe needed to focus on the rocky body with sufficient accuracy – ensuring that it was centralized for the cameras. and other instruments on board.
"[Ultima] has only the size of something like Washington DC," Stern explained. "It is illuminated by a sun that is 1,900 times lower than a sunny day on Earth." We chased it in the dark at 32,000 mph (51,000 km / h) and everything had to go according to plan. . "
1% of all data collected by New Horizons was sent to Earth.
What is so special about the Kuiper belt?
The Ultima Thule and its environment are subject to several factors so interesting to scientists.
In the first place, the sun is so weak in this region that temperatures reach 30 or 40 degrees below absolute zero. As a result, chemical reactions have become essentially paralyzed.
Another factor is that Ultima is small and therefore does not have a geological mechanism that, in larger objects, modifies its composition.
The reason is only the nature of this environment: the Kuiper belt is relatively quiet, with few collisions between objects, for example.
"All that we will learn about Ultima – from its composition to its geology, as it was originally formed., If it has satellites and an atmosphere, it will tell us on the initial conditions of formation of other objects in the solar system ", welcomes Alan Stern.
First, scientists need to work on Ultima's data, but they will also ask NASA to fund a further extension of the mission.
Hopefully, the path of the probe will be slightly modified to visit at least one other object of the Kuiper Belt over the next decade.
New Horizons must have sufficient fuel reserves to do so; it should also provide enough electrical power to continue using its instruments in the 2030s.
The longevity of the New Horizon plutonium battery could even allow it to record its solar system output [19659022].
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