Earlier this year, in the early morning hours of January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the small object 2014 MU69.
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| The New Horizons spacecraft - NASA - http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/detail.cfm?mediaid=27362 |
New Horizons launched from Earth in January 2006, and flew by Pluto in July 2015, giving us our very first images of Pluto's surface. Not just any pictures, but high resolution images showing a cratered surface, mountains, and a thin atmosphere! New Horizons continued on to the outer solar system and astronomers later determined an outer Solar System object called 2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultimate Thule) was a good target close to New Horizons for an upcoming flyby. Well that flyby was successful and images are starting to come in.
2014 MU69
The object 2014 MU69 is much, much smaller than Pluto, with a size of 30 km by 20 km. It has an average distance from the Sun of about 45 AU, so slightly farther away than Pluto's 40 AU. It was first discovered in 2014, thus the '2014' in its official name. Here is one of the first pictures to be returned.
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| 2014 MU69 taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)- NASA - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/808/nasas-new-horizons-mission-reveals-entirely-new-kind-of-world/ |
Okay, that is super cool! This is not two objects but one object with what appear to be two parts connected. How this formed is not known yet, but I guarantee astronomers will be studying this in the coming months and years.
The Future
The study of the flyby is far from done. This is just one of the very first images. Higher resolution images are expected in February and astronomers will likely be studying this object for months to years. This is the most distant object in the Solar System a spacecraft has every flown by! On top of that, New Horizons is not necessarily done either. Astronomers will continue to look for other nearby objects that might be visited while New Horizons is still operational. We'll just have to wait and see if they find anything.
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