Tag: 2014 MU69

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Probe sends first glimpse of distant icy world

Ultima Thule views
The left image shows a raw, pixel-by-pixel view of an icy object known as Ultima Thule, as captured by NASA’s New Horizons probe at 11:56 a.m. ET Dec. 30 from a distance of 1.2 million miles. (JHUAPL / SwRI / NASA via YouTube)

LAUREL, Md. — The science team for NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft released its first multi-pixel view of an icy world more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and the analysis suggests it’s an elongated space cigar.

“We know it’s not round, we can say that with confidence,” John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the mission’s project scientists, said today during a news briefing scheduled just hours before the probe was due to fly just 2,200 miles past the mysterious object.

Based on observations made on Earth during stellar occultations, Spencer and other astronomers suspected that the object — known by its formal designation, 2014 MU69, or by its nickname, Ultima Thule — might be made of smooshed-together chunks of ice and rock.

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Ring in the New Year with history’s farthest flyby

Alan Stern
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, stands alongside a scale model of the New Horizons spacecraft after a briefing on the Ultima Thule flyby. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LAUREL, Md. — The sleeping bags are rolled out and the videos are cued up for a New Year’s celebration of cosmic proportions here at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, but the star of the show is still a mystery.

That’ll change once NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flies past an icy object more than 4 billion miles from Earth, known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule.

The piano-sized probe is due to make its closest approach at 12:33 a.m. ET on New Year’s Day (9:33 p.m. PT Dec. 31), nearly 13 years after New Horizons’ launch and three and a half years after it flew past Pluto.

Mission managers say it’s all systems go for history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial body.

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New Horizons probe zeroes in on Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule and New Horizons
An artist’s conception shows Ultima Thule with the New Horizons probe silhouetted by the sun. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object.

The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify its next quarry, a billion miles farther out in the Kuiper Belt. Now it’s crunch time for New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and his team.

Again.

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New Horizons probe wakes up for post-Pluto flyby

Ultima Thule and New Horizons
An artist’s conception shows Ultima Thule with the New Horizons probe silhouetted by the sun. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

The mission operations team for NASA’s New Horizons probe has awakened the spacecraft from its robotic hibernation, and now it’ll stay awake for its scheduled Jan. 1 flyby of a mysterious object on the solar system’s edge, known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule.

New Horizons has been traveling toward Ultima Thule since its history-making Pluto flyby in 2015. To save on resources, the piano-sized probe has been in hibernation mode since last Dec. 21.

The radio signals confirming New Horizons’ latest wakeup call took more than five and a half hours to flash at the speed of light from the solar system’s frontier to NASA’s Deep Space Network, and onward to mission control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. The good news finally arrived at 2:12 a.m. ET today (11:12 p.m. PT June 4).

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Pluto probe’s next target nicknamed Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule and New Horizons
An artist’s conception shows Ultima Thule with the New Horizons probe silhouetted by the sun. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

Nearly three years after flying past Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a target more than 4 billion miles from Earth. It’s officially known as 2014 MU69, but now the New Horizons team has decided to call it Ultima Thule (“UL-ti-ma THOO-lee”), or Ultima for short.

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Nickname the next target for New Horizons

New Horizons at 2014 MU69
An artist’s conception shows the New Horizons spacecraft flying past 2014 MU69, which scientists say could be a binary orbiting pair of bodies with diameters in the range of 11 to 12 miles. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

2014 MU69 just won’t cut it, so NASA and the folks behind the New Horizons mission want you to help pick out a cooler nickname for the icy object that’s in their sights for New Year’s Day in 2019.

The contest is the latest suggest-a-name campaign from New Horizons’ scientists, who provided a similar suggestion box for the moons that were discovered during the run-up to the mission’s momentous Pluto flyby in 2015.

That earlier contest eventually led to the naming of the Plutonian moons Styx and Kerberos (but alas, not Vulcan, the people’s choice).

Now the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft is gearing up for that 2019 encounter with 2014 MU69, an icy world (or pair of worlds) that lies a billion miles beyond Pluto in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt.

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