Ultima Thule in 3D

Cross your eyes and break out the 3D glasses! NASA's New Horizons team has created new stereo views of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule - the target of the New Horizons spacecraft's historic New Year's 2019 flyby, four billion miles from Earth - and the images are as cool and captivating as they are scientifically valuable.

The 3D effects come from pairing or combining images taken at slightly different viewing angles, creating a "binocular" effect, just as the slight separation of our eyes allows us to see three-dimensionally.

For the images on this page, the New Horizons team paired sets of processed images taken by the spacecraft's Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at 5:01 and 5:26 Universal Time on Jan. 1, from respective distances of 17,400 miles (28,000 kilometers) and 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers), offering respective original scales of about 430 feet (130 meters) and 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel.

The viewing direction for the earlier sequence was slightly different than the later set, which consists of the highest-resolution images obtained with LORRI. The closer view offers about four times higher resolution per pixel but, because of shorter exposure time, lower image quality. The combination, however, creates a stereo view of the object (officially named 2014 MU69) better than the team could previously create.

"These views provide a clearer picture of Ultima Thule's overall shape," said mission principal investigator Alan Stern, from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, "including the flattened shape of the large lobe, as well as the shape of individual topographic features such as the "neck" connecting the two lobes, the large depression on the smaller lobe, and hills and valleys on the larger lobe."

"We have been looking forward to this high-quality stereo view since long before the flyby," added John Spencer, New Horizons deputy project scientist from SwRI. "Now we can use this rich, three-dimensional view to help us understand how Ultima Thule came to have its extraordinary shape."

Related Links
New Horizons
The million outer planets of a star called Sol

Tweet

Thanks for being there;
We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain.

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.

SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter
$5+ Billed Monthly

paypal only

SpaceDaily Contributor
$5 Billed Once

credit card or paypal

SwRI-led New Horizons research indicates small Kuiper Belt objects are surprisingly rare
San Antonio TX (SPX) Mar 04, 2019
Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto's largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare. The ... read more