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Old 01-02-2019, 02:16 PM   #127
Edward64
General Manager
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Okay, its cool we were able to do this, human ingenuity and all.

But com'on, its just a rock. Can we start more serious exploration of Saturn/Jupiter/moons with water.

Nasa's New Horizons: 'Snowman' shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed - BBC News
Quote:
The ice world known as Ultima Thule has finally been revealed.

A new picture returned from Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft shows the little world to be two objects joined together - to give a look like a "snowman".

The US probe's images acquired as it approached Ultima hinted at the possibility of a double body, but the first detailed picture from Tuesday's close flyby confirms it.

New Horizons encountered Ultima 6.5 billion km from Earth.

The event set a record for the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. The previous mark was also set by New Horizons when it flew past the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015.

But Ultima is a further 1.5 billion km further out.

The mission team has decided to call the larger lobe "Ultima" and the smaller lobe "Thule". The volume ratio is three to one.

Jeff Moore, a New Horizons co-investigator from Nasa's Ames Research Center, said the pair would have come together at very low speed, at maybe 2-3km/h. He joked that if they were cars, "you probably wouldn't fill out the insurance form.

Ultima orbits the Sun in a region of the Solar System known as the Kuiper belt.

There are hundreds of thousands of Kuiper members like Ultima, and their frigid state almost certainly holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago.
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The hope is that the course of the spacecraft can be altered slightly to visit at least one more Kuiper belt object sometime in the next decade.

New Horizons should have just enough fuel reserves to be able to do this. Critically, it should also have sufficient electrical reserves to keep operating its instruments into the 2030s.
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