New High Resolution Image of Ultima Thule | Hacker News Reader

New High Resolution Image of Ultima Thule

pluto.jhuapl.edu

87 pointsskunkworker21 comments

Amazing picture. That crater on Thule, the smaller one, is curious, the impact should have obliterated it. Maybe it's not a crater but a depression left over from when it was attached to Ultima in a different place, before it rolled into the current configuration. There's a faint white ring on Ultima in the right spot.

(I am not at all an astronomer, just guessing)

Interesting observation

I had the same thought!

Weird: an asteroid shaped just like Ultima Thule was an important plot point in an awesome Super-8 (very low budget) film from 1981. Found it on YouTube. Worth mentioning the computer graphics were done on an Apple ][. Graphics took time to render one frame but were then photographed stop-motion style.

https://youtu.be/mPaPe3aJEPI

I've not followed this too much, but is this an intermediate step or can we expect more detail than this?

Higher resolution images are coming, and some will have better shadows that will reveal more detail.

Did they capture color or just not enough light for that?

Chances are they did (we know they did for the Pluto encounter), but right now they're prioritizing the most potentially scientifically interesting images as it's going to take 20 months to download the entire data set.

Usually comets look gray even in color pictures.

True-color image of comet 67P/C-G: https://i.imgur.com/wVMkBOV.jpg

They did capture color. Ultima Thule is red.

https://www.space.com/42878-ultima-thule-new-horizons-first-...

There was a low-resolution colour camera and a high-resolution black-and-white camera. But the colour information isn't very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69#Gallery

In time. I hunted a bit for something to mention how long it'll take to get all the data, and found: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2018/what-to...

>As MU69 is substantially farther from Earth than Pluto was, the data downlink will be slower; it’s expected to take 20 months, conveniently wrapping up around the end of fiscal year 2020.

If you're interested in following these things, the Deep Space Network Now page [1] is a fun one to keep bookmarked. It displays the real time status of each DSN station and what spacecraft they are communicating with. [edit] you'll want to click on "more detail" on the lower right to see the technical information about the signals for each antenna.

Right now, Canberra has both an uplink and a downlink going to New Horizons.

Even more fun is when they get a downlink from one of the Voyager probes. The signal strength is so incredibly small, it's testament to very skilled engineers developing the signal processing they use.

[1] https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

Nice one. Besides that huge depression on Thule, what's also interesting is that they must have made contact very gently, possibly after circling each other for millennia, otherwise the result would look very different.

It’s that pillsbury dough boy spaceship from Austin Powers disguised with rock

Sort of looks like two rocks mashed together, but without quite enough mass to really round out. I'm sure that's totally wrong but still neat to see.

On the big one in particular it looks like you can see the outline of several other large rocks that come together to form it.

If the big one and the small one both came together from relatively large rocks, why would they be smooth but not completely joined together? Whatever smoothed the small one or the large one should smooth them both together, unless the large and small ones both started out as smooth because of their formation from much smaller pebbles.

I believe that's the prevailing theory for what it is.

You've got it right, Ultima Thule is what's called a contact binary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_binary_(small_Solar_Sy...

That's no moon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com