[ad_1]
The photographs depict the mysterious MU69 2014 space object of the Kuiper Belt, dubbed Ultima Thule, now exists in the form of more than one generic-looking spot. The latest images of Ultima Thule display a resolution of 110 feet per pixel, the best images of the strange body encountered by New Horizons. NASA's spacecraft captured the high-definition photographs of Ultima Thule, a far-flung asteroid that rightly means "beyond the known world", at a distance of only 4,109 kilometers.
NASA scientists already knew some details about Ultima Thule, such as its pancake shape.
But these recently released high-quality photographs have revealed details previously invisible.
These include circular terrain zones, deep hole marks, and other previously unseizable details.
NASA's New Horizons has become closer to MU69 than its main goal, Pluto, thanks to "unprecedented precision" in the calculations of several countries.
According to NASA's senior mission researcher, Dr. Alan Stern, there was a real chance that New Horizons' camera was totally missing Ultima Thule.
READ MORE: Mysterious signals 1.5 billion light-years away from the "evidence" of extraterrestrial life
Dr. Stern said, "The obtaining of these images asked us to know precisely where were the tiny Ultima and New Horizons, intersecting at more than 30,000 km / h in the dim light of the Kuiper Belt, to a billion kilometers from Pluto.
"It was an observation much more difficult than anything we had attempted during our flyby of Pluto in 2015."
The Southwest Research Institute said: "The science, operations and navigation teams have understood this well and the result is a field day for our science team!
"Some of the details we see now on the surface of Ultima Thule do not look like anything ever explored before."
READ MORE: Hunting for foreigners "just getting started" says high-level scientist
Ultima Thule is the farthest object humanity has ever examined so closely, according to Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The Ultima Thule is 20 miles long and has not changed since the beginnings of our solar system.
The first batch revealed that the asteroid was in the form of a shady, deformed peanut composed of two lobes that touched each other and were called a binary contact.
READ MORE: CERN's "EVIL TWIN" worth 50,000 billion pounds sterling flush by GRAM
More pictures showed that the rock looked more like a pancake than a bump.
The images revealed strange freckles and dark bumps on the asteroid that scientists are trying to understand.
John Spencer, NASA's New Horizons Project Scientist, said, "Whether these features are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something completely different, our science team is debating. "
READ MORE: NASA in an extraterrestrial life breakthrough after the discovery of its DNA
[ad_2]
Source link