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KYIV. January 3, UNN. The Asteroid Ultima Thule is a binary asteroid composed of two parts that united at an early stage of formation of our solar system. On this reported Wednesday the US Department of State for Aeronautics and Space Exploration (NASA), informs UNN .
According to him, the conclusion was taken after receiving and analyzing the images of an asteroid manufactured interplanetary station of New Horizons Tuesday from a distance of 27,000 km. "The new photos revealed that Ultima Thule is a double contact body consisting of two interconnected spheres, reaching a length of 31 km and our group called the largest Ultima zone (19 km in diameter), but the smaller sphere is Tula (14 km), "NASA explained in a published message.
An automatic station, passing in front of an asteroid, sent a signal that entered the shipping control center at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on Tuesday at 10:29 am on the east coast from the United States (17:29 in Kiev). It happened almost 10 hours after the New Horizons found themselves facing Ultima Thule.
Externally, Ultima Thule looks like a bowling ball. Before the New Horizons flight, scientists did not know if the asteroid was monolithic or made up of two bodies of different sizes. Ultima Thule rotates like a propeller and the conditional axis is tilted toward the station with one end, which is why the brightness of the asteroid has not nearly changed during its rotation.
We recall that NASA has released the first pictures of the space "skewer".
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