[ad_1]
The space snowman visited by NASA on New Year's Day is cluttered with holes and has a bright "collar" between its two fused spheres.
READ MORE:
An icy object found more than a billion kilometers from Pluto looks like a snowman
These are the most recent details about Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever explored.
A close-up photo taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft just before its closest approach on January 1, and released on Thursday, shows numerous small pits on Ultima Thule. They are less than 800 meters wide. There is also a much larger circular depression on the smaller lobe, considered the snowman's head. Scientists do not know if they are impact craters or sinkholes.
Clbadified as a contact binary, the reddish Thula Ultima, with a length of about 32 km (20 km), presents clear and dark patterns. The brighter point is where the two lobes connect. Scientists say that varied shadows can help explain the formation of the ancient object because the solar system was emerging 4.5 billion years ago.
WATCH: NASA publishes new images of rock shaped snowman
Senior scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute promises even better images in the next month. It will take nearly two years for New Horizons to transmit all overflight data to 6.4 billion kilometers.
Over such a long distance, it takes more than six hours for the radio signals to propagate in one direction. New Horizons is already more than 30 million km beyond Ultima Thule.
Launched in 2006, the satellite became the first visitor to the Pluto dwarf planet in 2015. Ultima Thule was its second target. A third destination – even deeper inside the so-called Kuiper belt on the frozen fringes of our solar system – could be possible in the 2020s.
[ad_2]
Source link
