In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, New Horizons has reached and passed by the Kuiper Belt rock dubbed Ultima Thule sometime in the last 24 hours, and is now in the process of transmitting the data it’s collected. Here’s the latest pic from the latest story on the Johns Hopkins APL web site:
At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane
An exciting time for us space exploration junkies. I’m mostly in it for the drama, of course.
