New Horizons takes first picture of distant second target

[Judi Lynn]

Spacecraft's photographs will help mission team refine the path to Ultima Thule.
By Laurel Kornfeld | 2 hours ago

More than four months before its scheduled flyby of Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) Ultima Thule, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured its first image of its small second target.

The spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photographed the dim KBO on August 16 from a distance of more than 100 million miles, surprising mission scientists, who did not expect any images of the object until September.

LORRI took a total of 48 images of the faint KBO against a dense background of stars, which it transmitted back to Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).

All previous images of Ultima Thule were either captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) or obtained via ground-based telescopes when the KBO passed in front of a background star, casting a shadow.

More:
https://thespacereporter.com/article.php?n=new-horizons-takes-first-picture-of-distant-second-target&id=164710

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Odd - that's about what happened last August

It's basically this story: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-horizons-takes-its-first-image-of-its-next-target-ultima-thule?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1 , but I can't find the exact wording anywhere else. It's as if the author sat down to rewrite an article that was nearly 5 months out-of-date. And that site published another out-of-date report on New Horizons and Ultima Thule just a couple of days ago: https://thespacereporter.com/article.php?n=new-horizons-sets-its-sights-on-kuiper-belt-object&id=164819

Another out-of-date New Horizons story on that site - https://thespacereporter.com/article.php?n=new-horizons-spots-hydrogen-wall-at-edge-of-solar-system&id=162417 - again, published this month, but rewritten from something last August: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-horizons-may-have-seen-glow-solar-systems-edge