A team of scientists will reveal more information on Ultima Thule — an object that lies 6.5 billion kilometres from Earth — when they address a news conference today.
The “snowman,” as it’s been referred to by scientists, is 32 km by 16 km and lies in the Kuiper Belt, a doughnut-shaped region beyond Neptune that is home to perhaps trillions of icy objects left over from the formation of our solar system.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft whizzed by Ultima Thule in the early morning of Jan. 1, at speeds of nearly 14 km a second, as several instruments and cameras gathered information. It will take approximately two years for all the data to be sent back to Earth, as communications take six hours one way due to how distant the spacecraft is.
At a news conference on Wednesday, the team revealed the first images sent back by New Horizons.
Scientists are studying the object to better understand the solar system’s formation.
New Horizons launched in 2006 on a mission to fly by Pluto, which it did on July 4, 2015.
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern has said another target in the Kuiper Belt will likely be chosen for another flyby in the upcoming years.
from Update Trend News http://bit.ly/2QillmB
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