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New Horizons probe approaches the mysterious Ultima Thule

Twelve years ago, NASA launched the New Horizons probe. The primary mission was to study Pluto and get the very first up-close views of Pluto to help us learn more about the most famous not-a-planet.

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Reaching Pluto was not an easy feat. Pluto is about 40 times as far away from the Sun as the Earth is – 3.7 billion miles (or 5.9 billion kilometers if you’re scientifically literate). In order to get to Pluto as quickly as possible, New Horizons did a few gravity assists around other celestial objects, stealing some of their speed to propel it even faster while not having to spend any extra fuel. In total, after traveling for about nine and a half years, New Horizons only had about NINE minutes to collect data as it whizzed by Pluto. That’s because New Horizons is moving at over 36,000 miles per hour (58.5 kilometers per hour). That’s 10 miles (16 kilometers) every second.

What makes this even more mind-boggling is the fact that when New Horizons flew by Pluto, it took over 5 hours for New Horizons to send the first signal back to Earth.

But now, New Horizons is closing in on its secondary mission: Ultima Thule (pronounced UL-ti-ma THOO-lee).

As Geekwire reported:

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.

“This flyby is a lot harder than Pluto,” Stern said. “Ultima is tiny, and faint, much harder to navigate on. … Another difficulty, or challenge, really, is that we’re farther away, and that means communication times are longer. Bit rates are lower.”

It now takes about six hours for commands to be sent to New Horizons. It takes another six hours for New Horizons to confirm the received settings. That’s a twelve hour turnaround anytime you want to make an adjustment.

Yesterday, NASA sent commands to New Horizons that fine tuned its trajectory to attempt a rendezvous with Ultima Thule.

What is Ultima Thule?

Good question. We’re not really sure yet.

“We don’t know what a primordial, ancient, perfectly preserved object like Ultima is, because no one’s ever been to something like this,” Stern explained. “It’s terra incognita. It is pure exploration. We’ll just see what it’s all about — if it’s got rings, if it’s got a swarm of satellites.”

Ultima Thule’s official name is (486958) 2014 MU69, but that’s just not as sexy as calling it Ultima Thule. It’s a Kuiper Belt object that is about a billion miles beyond Pluto. It’s thought to be an icy object that was leftover from the formation of the Solar System. It could also be a two or more objects that are in very close orbit of one another.

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The Hubble Space Telescope estimated the object to be about 20 miles (32 kilometers) wide.

“It’s a one-shot, ‘get it right or go home’ deal, because there’s no U-turn to go back and have a re-do. … You have to plan every chess move with the spacecraft more carefully,” said Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

Either way, the current plan is for New Horizons to come within 2200 miles (3500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule, unless New Horizons spots mini-moons around Ultima Thule.

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will pass by Ultima at a distance of 2,200 miles, or less than a third of the distance used for the Pluto flyby, But the mission team is on the watch for any mini-moons that would force a shift to a safer, more distant trajectory.

During a recent rehearsal, the team had to cope with a worst-case scenario in which New Horizons spotted 11 satellites in Ultima’s vicinity. “It was just flying into a hornet’s nest,” Stern recalled.

Neither Stern nor anyone else knows exactly what New Horizons will actually see.

“We don’t know what a primordial, ancient, perfectly preserved object like Ultima is, because no one’s ever been to something like this,” Stern explained. “It’s terra incognita. It is pure exploration. We’ll just see what it’s all about — if it’s got rings, if it’s got a swarm of satellites.”

The flyby will happen at just after midnight on New Years’ Day, at 12:33 am Eastern time. It won’t be until about 7 am Eastern until the team gets its first indications of mission success (or failure), and it will likely be weeks – or months – until we get much of the data sent back.

(Cover image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration / Steve Gribben)

Written by Dan Broadbent

Science Enthusiast. Atheist. Lover of cats.

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