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NASA shared a new image of the New Horizons spacecraft that was taken just minutes before its closest flyby of Ultima Thule on New Year's Day. The image, seen below, is the only one of its kind. The most detailed object ever made of the Kuiper belt and has a resolution of about 110 feet per pixel. NASA said that the complete processed image that we see here is a composite image consisting of nine individual photos.
The images were all taken with the Long Range Recognition Imager or (LORRI). Each image was exposed for about 0.025 seconds and captured 6.5 minutes before the closest approach to the object. New Horizons was 4,177 miles from Ultima Thule.
The picture was taken at 00:26 EST on January 1, 2019 and, at the time, New Horizons was at 4.1 billion kilometers from Earth. Ultima Thue and New Horizons crossed at over 32,000 km / h, NASA reported. Capturing images from Ultima Thule was not the mission of New Horizons.
New Horizons took pictures of Pluto in 2015 and is now one billion kilometers from the old planet. According to NASA, the new image allows scientists to see the characteristics of the surface that do not appear in previous images. NASA indicates whether the scientific team will discuss whether the small dark pits near Ultima Thule are impact creators, collapse pits or anything else.
The New Horizons team views Ultima Thule's images as an "expandable lens" and notes that she feared that the spacecraft could not get Ultima Thule into the narrow field of view of the camera. The overflight of the Kuiper Belt object required the highest navigational accuracy ever achieved by a spacecraft.
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