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New Horizons Spacecraft Returns Its Sharpest Views of Ultima Thule
The most detailed images of Ultima Thule -- obtained just minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1 -- have a resolution of about 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel. Their combination of higher spatial resolution and a favorable viewing geometry offer an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the surface of Ultima Thule, believed to be the most primitive object ever encountered by a spacecraft. This processed, composite picture combines nine individual images taken with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), each with an exposure time of 0.025 seconds, just 6 ½ minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach to Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69). The image was taken at 5:26 UT (12:26 a.m. EST) on Jan. 1, 2019, when the spacecraft was 4,109 miles (6,628 kilometers) from Ultima Thule and 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth. The angle between the spacecraft, Ultima Thule and the Sun – known as the "phase angle" – was 33 degrees.
[...] Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, noted that the latest images have the highest spatial resolution of any New Horizons has taken – or may ever take – during its entire mission. Swooping within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers), New Horizons flew approximately three times closer to Ultima than it zipped past its primary mission target, Pluto, in July 2015.
This was from about 6,628 km away rather than the 3,500 km of the closest approach. Will we get to see ~17.5 meters per pixel from the moment of the flyby (about 4 times the quality)?
Previously: New Horizons Departing View of Ultima Thule Reveals Flattened Shape
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 24 2019, @12:46PM
Just thinking a bit about solar system formation. All elements heavier than helium are thought to have come from supernova explosions. (I wonder if there could be little blobs of liquid or solid helium or hydrogen drifting about in the areas of space cold enough for those elements not to be gaseous, but I'm guessing not.)
So these Kuiper belt objects formed at very high temperatures. Started out as hunks of super heated plasma that'd been torn loose from a star that had just gone supernova. Possibly they are made of the lighter elements from the "crust" regions of the star, so will be almost entirely elements from carbon to iron, won't be much gold or iridium or other such heavy metals. Evidently, they were hot long enough to flow into a roughly spherical shape. They did not freeze into a bug splatter shape. It's not an extremely irregular "shredded chicken" sort of shape. And, then, they have changed very little ever since.