NASA Releases First Clear Images of Distant Kuiper Belt Object (engadget.com)

NASA's New Horizons team has released the promised first images from its history-making flyby of (486958) 2014 MU69. "The snapshots, captured from as close at 17,000 miles away, show that the 21-mile-long Kuiper Belt object is a 'contract binary' where two spheres slowly collided and fused with each other," reports Engadget. "The two may have linked up '99 percent of the way' to the start of the Solar System, Johns Hopkins University APL said." From the report: Capturing a true representation of 2014 MU69 is difficult, at least with the initial batch of pictures. There's a visible light camera onboard the New Horizons Probe (shown on the left), but the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (center) is much sharper. To create an accurate image (on the right), scientists had to produce a composite. Higher-resolution pictures and additional scientific data will keep flowing over the "next weeks and months," the New Horizons team said.

Comments

Re:Never A Straight Answer

[Donwulff]

17,000 times the average distance to the moon. Raw images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/ - of course, it's not worth trying to convince the kind of people who believe Earth is flat and humans have never gone to Moon that these are real. In the linked article, the short version: Left image is color picture, middle image is higher-resolution black and white one, and the rightmost is a composite with colors from the color image and finer features from the black and white one.

It's worth remembering that at that distance from the Sun there's barely any light, and at the closest approach 2014 MU69 passes the probe's field of vision in less than 3 seconds at their incident speeds - and due to the distance they weren't even sure which three seconds! It's a remarkable feat all in all, there's higher resolution images hopefully yet to come during the almost two year data-return window, but it isn't going to be perfectly in focus long-exposure HDR photography.

Re:Never A Straight Answer

[Rei]

Getting the data is hard enough. They're lucky when they can download at 1 kbps, and roughly 1 in every 10 bits is an error. It's going to take 20 months to download all of the data from this encounter.

Much better images are coming (even today we'll get somewhat better images), but it's going to take time. "Visually appealing images" are also competing against other scientific data for bandwidth. The best pictures will be about 4 times better resolution (on each axis). Also, this first picture was almost "dead on" with respect to the sun, which hides surface contours; later pictures will be at steeper angles, which will show the surface much better.

Re:Hot take from Gizmodo and Newsweek

[Rei]

"Thule" and "Ultima Thule" generally referred to Iceland and Greenland, and has been used to refer to distant lands for millennia. It's unfair that one particular group's cooption of the term is supposed to have ruined it.

There are better sources on this

[Headw1nd]

Here's a better article, that doesn't prattle about Nazis: http://www.astronomy.com/news/...