New Movie Shows Ultima Thule from an Approaching New Horizons
This movie shows the propeller-like rotation of Ultima Thule in the seven hours between 20:00 UT (3 p.m. ET) on Dec. 31, 2018, and 05:01 UT (12:01 a.m.) on Jan. 1, 2019, as seen by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA's New Horizons as the spacecraft sped toward its close encounter with the Kuiper Belt object at 05:33 UT (12:33 a.m. ET) on Jan. 1.
The images, which cover about a half of a rotation, help illustrate the solution to Ultima Thule's apparent lack of brightness variations:
The brief video also shows why New Horizons didn't detect any brightness variations from Ultima Thule during the approach phase, a surprising development that initially puzzled the mission team. The lack of such a "light curve" is expected for spherical objects, which don't shift from a viewer's perspective as they rotate, but early data indicated that the 21-mile-long (34 km) Ultima Thule was highly elongated.
As we can now see, it was all about New Horizons' orientation to Ultima Thule. The object's pole of rotation was pointing directly at the approaching spacecraft, so New Horizons didn't see any appreciable changes in the light bouncing off Ultima Thule.
Previously: New Horizons Survives Flyby, Begins Sending Back Data
New Images Reveal Structure, Color, and Features of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule)
Related Stories
New Horizons: Nasa probe survives flyby of Ultima Thule
The US space agency's New Horizons probe has made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of the icy world known as Ultima Thule.
The encounter occurred some 6.5bn km (4bn miles) away, making it the most distant ever exploration of an object in our Solar System.
New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass.
It will now send these home over the coming months.
[...] Even just the final picture released from the approach phase to the flyby contained tantalising information. Ultima appears in it as just a blob, but immediately it has allowed researchers to refine their estimate of the object's size - about 35km by 15km.
It should be become clear within the next day or two whether or not 2014 MU69 is double-lobed or a binary object.
Additionally, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory self-reports:
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtags #UltimaThule, #UltimaFlyby and #askNewHorizons to join the conversation. Live updates and links to mission information are also available on http://pluto.jhuapl.edu and www.nasa.gov.
Also at: Ars Technica, The New York Times, ScienceNews, and phys.org.
Previously: Final Planning for the New Horizons Flyby of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule) Underway
2014 MU69 has two nearly-spherical lobes and is a contact binary. The collision between the two lobes happened at a low relative velocity, causing little damage to the resulting object. The "neck" between the lobes contains brighter material which appears to be dust that has settled down the slopes that run towards the point of contact.
[Added BBC link -ed]
New Horizons' Newest and Best-Yet View of Ultima Thule
Obtained with the wide-angle Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) component of New Horizons' Ralph instrument, this image was taken when the KBO was 4,200 miles (6,700 kilometers) from the spacecraft, at 05:26 UT (12:26 a.m. EST) on Jan. 1 – just seven minutes before closest approach. With an original resolution of 440 feet (135 meters) per pixel, the image was stored in the spacecraft's data memory and transmitted to Earth on Jan. 18-19. Scientists then sharpened the image to enhance fine detail. (This process – known as deconvolution – also amplifies the graininess of the image when viewed at high contrast.)
The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top. These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles (0.7 kilometers) in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles (7 kilometers) across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as "collapse pits" or the ancient venting of volatile materials.
MVIC (Ralph) has a lower resolution than LORRI, which should have taken its best images at around 30-35 meters per pixel.
Also at Spaceflight Now, BBC, and TechCrunch.
Previously: Final Planning for the New Horizons Flyby of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule) Underway
New Horizons Survives Flyby, Begins Sending Back Data
New Images Reveal Structure, Color, and Features of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule)
Animation Shows Rotation of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule)
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 18 2019, @05:11PM (4 children)
Annoyingly, on the new horizons website they have stored photos as jpg. I wonder if they have a bitmap format somewhere?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 18 2019, @05:51PM (2 children)
Apparently not.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/ [jhuapl.edu]
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(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 18 2019, @06:04PM (1 child)
Maybe New Horizons broadcasts in jpg format! Perhaps no one told them it is lossy!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 18 2019, @06:30PM
It does have a limited amount of total data storage, but I still doubt that is the case.
Maybe I'll email the New Horizons team and ask them why "Raw" means JPEG. After confirming they aren't some kind of lossless JPEGs first.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @12:03AM
Do you mean BMP format? That takes up a lot of space. Non-compressed PNG may be a better option; it has an option of non-lossy compression.
At this stage, hosting storage space may not be a significant issue, but there are a lot more photos to come. If you plan ahead, then BMP probably wouldn't be the best choice.
Incidentally, I heard elsewhere they expect the "close up" photos to arrive roughly around the end of February.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Friday January 18 2019, @05:19PM (6 children)
To my untrained eye, it looks just like the rubber ducky object in the asteroid belt.
Compared to the amazing photos of Pluto, this is pretty dull (pun intended).
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 18 2019, @07:32PM (5 children)
It's good for science funding that Pluto delivered, because we this one we got peanuts.
Literally: one giant peanut.
Takes a specialist to get excited ... or a very hungry person.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday January 18 2019, @08:12PM (4 children)
Nothing like 2014 MU69 has been observed before. Not only did the two lobes come together at a low velocity, but the object is relatively unmarred by impacts due to forming far outside of the inner solar system, and hasn't been damaged by close approaches to the Sun like 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and other comets have. It's a great find that will help us understand the Kuiper belt, a region containing many times more mass than the asteroid belt.
The flyby was a bonus, and the target was discovered years after the spacecraft launched. That fact alone is compelling.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @12:06AM (3 children)
I hope they can find more targets for NH to visit. It's not easy. Earth-bound scopes failed to find targets when they tried. It took Hubble to find Thule.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 19 2019, @12:49AM (2 children)
Like I said in a previous comment, the LSST [wikipedia.org] might be ideal for this. Then you have the JWST, which hopefully would come online around the same time. Hubble's latest problem was just fixed so it is still in the running. It was also suggested that New Horizons could find its own target using the LORRI camera. But that probably won't happen until all the data is sent back, which will take another 19-20 months. So a target ought to be found between 2020-2021.
Unfortunately, if the Kuiper belt ends around 55 AU, New Horizons may exit before we can find a new target. It seems to be traveling [jhuapl.edu] 1 AU in about 100 days, so it could be out in 3-4 years. (If you can come up with better numbers, please post them.)
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 21 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
The good news is that they only need to search in a very narrow cone which NH could visit.
The bad news is that they need to find something in that cone.
In the meantime, I guess they can take general pictures of the view from that very distant observation point, just in case someone running an algorithm in 20 years happens to find something important in them.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 21 2019, @05:28PM
Yes, they have already been doing stuff along those lines as well as taking oblique views of known KBOs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Observations_of_other_KBOs [wikipedia.org]
It can reveal details that may not be visible from Earth. When it comes to these distant objects, the Sun and Earth are essentially in the same place all the time. Part of the reason why 2014 MU69 was so mysterious was that its axis of rotation was facing us.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @02:34AM
It is already orbiting so how can it rotate if angular momentum is conserved? Earth rotates, and so it doesn't orbit (well, rather everything else orbits around it), but this is orbitting the star so clearly this video is false. This, truly, is clay in stop motion. They even used a shitty webcam, why would an expensive probe have old webcam? It doesn't, because it doesn't exist.
Checkfriend, mate.