While the name Ultima Thule, referring to the space rock 2014 MU69 which was surveyed by the New Horizons space probe, had a lovely exotic taste to it, it also had an unfortunate referent to it:
Goodbye Ultima Thule, hello Arrokoth. The space rock that NASA’s New Horizons probe sped past earlier this year has been given a new name: Arrokoth, which means “sky” in the Powhatan and Algonquian languages.
The rock’s official designation is 2014 MU69, but the New Horizons team nicknamed it Ultima Thule, a mythological reference to a distant and mysterious land. The nickname faced a significant backlash after a reporter at Newsweek pointed out that the Nazi party used the phrase to refer to the mythical homeland of the Aryan people. [NewScientist]
While casting aspersions on the name Ultima Thule just because a bunch of barbarians used it to symbolize a mythical homeland seems a little short-sighted, I like Arrokoth, too. It’s properly inclusive, and has its own exotic mouth-feel, at least for me.
Although, if they had retained Ultima Thule and emphasized its barrenness, it would have brought to the fore the worthlessness of Nazi ideology.
So, onward to a picture of Arrokoth.
“This composite image of the primordial contact binary Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (officially named Arrokoth) was compiled from data obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by the object on Jan. 1, 2019. The image combines enhanced color data (close to what the human eye would see) with detailed high-resolution panchromatic pictures.”
[caption from NASA, etc]
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko
