Watch 'Ultima Thule' Planetesimal Rotate in Cool New Movie as NASA’s New Horizons Approaches for New Years Day Flyby

This movie shows 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, 2019. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Ken Kremer  --SpaceUpClose.com & RocketSTEM –15 January 2019

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERISTY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, LAUREL, MD –  Hold on to your seats real tight if you want to go on the ultimate wild ride on the farthest and coldest body ever visited up close in history – namely Ultima Thule ! 

The ‘Snowman’ shaped primordial object was observed in close proximity for the first time just moments after the clock struck midnight ringing in New Year’s Day 2019 during a history making close flyby by NASA’s groundbreaking  New Horizons spacecraft!

Today, Jan. 15, the science team leading NASA’s New Horizons mission has just released a super cool rotation movie composed of images taken by the onboard LORRI camera during the last seven hours of the probes closet approach to Ultima Thule – located some 4 Billion miles from Earth. 

This movie shows 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, 2019. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Ultima Thule was discovered to be a ‘contact binary’ and counts as the first planetesimal ever seen up close by an emissary from Earth and has remained virtually unchanged since it formed during the birth of our Solar System. 

These are the first new images released by the team since the last media briefing held on Jan. 3 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL), in Laurel, MD – attended by Space UpClose. 

Rotation Sequence of Ultima Thule. These raw images were used to create an animation demonstrating 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.  Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Data relay from the baby grand piano shaped spacecraft was interrupted for about a week starting on Jan. 4 as it passed behind the sun during a period of solar conjunction which prevented radio signals from reaching Earth. 

New Horizons has now reemerged from behind the sun and resumed data playback. It will take about 20 months to receive all the data gathered during the super successful  flyby and saved on the data recorders. 

Ultima Thule resembles the shape of a snowman in this image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), the most detailed returned so far by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers), with an original scale of 459 feet (140 meters) per pixel. The science team unveiled this image at the Jan 2, media briefing at JHU APL. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/spaceupclose.com

Ultima Thule is the most distant and most primitive object ever explored up close by a spaceship from humanity – a small icy rock in the Kuiper Belt located some 1 Billion miles (1.6 Billion km) beyond Pluto and orbits 4.1 Billion miles (6.6 Billion km) from the Sun and the Earth. So seeing it is sort of like traveling in a time machine back to the birth of our solar system.

This image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the most detailed of Ultima Thule returned so far by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers), with an original scale of 459 feet (140 meters) per pixel. The science team unveiled this image at the Jan 2, media briefing at JHU APL. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/spaceupclose.com

The newly released rotation 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.

Ultima Thule has a rotation period of about 16 hours. 

On New Year’s Day 2019 at 12:33 a.m. EST the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule within a distance of merely 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) while approaching at a velocity of 32,000 mph (9 miles per second).  It gathered about 50 GB of data including imagery, spectroscopy and research measurements using its 7 on board science instruments.

Here is a detailed description of the movie and images from the New Horizons team:

During this deep-space photo shoot – part of the farthest planetary flyby in history – New Horizons' range to Ultima Thule decreased from 310,000 miles (500,000 kilometers, farther than the distance from the Earth to the Moon) to just 17,100 miles (28,000 kilometers), during which the images became steadily larger and more detailed. The team processed two different image sequences; the bottom sequence shows the images at their original relative sizes, while the top corrects for the changing distance, so that Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69) appears at constant size but becomes more detailed as the approach progresses.

All the images have been sharpened using scientific techniques that enhance detail. The original image scale is 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) per pixel in the first frame, and 0.08 miles (0.14 kilometers) per pixel in the last frame. The rotation period of Ultima Thule is about 16 hours, so the movie covers a little under half a rotation. Among other things, the New Horizons science team will use these images to help determine the three-dimensional shape of Ultima Thule, in order to better understand its nature and origin.

The raw images included in the movie are available on the New Horizons LORRI website. New Horizons downlinked the two highest-resolution images in this movie immediately after the Jan. 1 flyby, but the more distant images were sent home on Jan. 12-14, after a week when New Horizons was too close to the Sun (from Earth's point of view) for reliable communications. New Horizons will continue to transmit images – including its closest views of Ultima Thule – and data for the next many months.

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“Ultima Thule” is an unchanged fossil remnant and planetesimal formed during the dawn of our solar system some 4.5 Billion Years ago.

Planetesimals are the tiny building blocks from which much larger structures like moons and planets are born by accretion of hordes of bits of matter over time.    

The bi-lobal rock is shaped remarkably like a ‘snowman’ and consists of two connected balls roughly spherical in appearance. 

The new world measures 19 miles (31 kilometers) in length. The team has unofficially nicknamed the larger sphere "Ultima" (12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere "Thule" (9 miles/14 kilometers across).

Watch for Ken’s continuing coverage of New Horizons and prior reporting direct from JHU APL.

Watch for Ken’s continuing onsite coverage of NASA, SpaceX, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and more space and mission reports direct from the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida and Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia.

Stay tuned here for Ken's continuing Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news: www.kenkremer.com –www.spaceupclose.com – twitter @ken_kremer – email: ken at kenkremer.com

Dr. Kremer is a research scientist, journalist and photographer based in the KSC area.

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