Ultima Thule Beyond Pluto Is Flat Like a Pancake (and Not a Space Snowman After All)

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | February 11, 2019 11:56am ET


The final photos that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft snapped of Ultima Thule during the probe's epic Jan. 1 flyby reveal the distant object to be far flatter than scientists had thought, mission team members announced today (Feb. 8).

"We had an impression of Ultima Thule based on the limited number of images returned in the days around the flyby, but seeing more data has significantly changed our view," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. [New Horizons at Ultima Thule: Full Coverage]

"It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule's shape is flatter, like a pancake," Stern added. "But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We've never seen something like this orbiting the sun."

The $720 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 to perform the first-ever flyby of Pluto. The probe aced this encounter in July 2015, revealing the dwarf planet to be a spectacularly diverse world of surprisingly varied and rugged landscapes.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/64739-ultima-thule-pancake-shape-new-horizons.html

[Turbineguy]

1. Great!

Let's ship a large number of Trump supporters there. They'd feel right at home on a flat planet.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Seems like an important discovery.

Wonder how many other findings will mess up a lot more theories?

[lastlib]

3. (not many, if the anti-science crowd has its way........)

. .