Take a Better Look at Ultima Thule

As promised, the higher-resolution images of 2014 MU69 Ultima Thule are starting to come in via the New Horizons spacecraft. Just today, the team released this image, which further reveals the lumpy, bumpy, and apparently cratered character of this tiny primordial planetesimal.

Just looking at this, we can see what look like craters, or something collapsed, on the top of the Ultima lobe (the smaller one). That depression is about seven kilometers across. It might be a crater, or it could be a depression called a “collapse pit”. Or, it might be an artifact left behind after this little KBO vented gases in the very distant past.

Even a little time examining both lobes reveals some differences between the two. The scientists on the New Horizons team suggested that the two lobes “gently” bumped in the past. They stuck together as a contact binary object. The bright ring between the two lobes, the “collar”, may contain clues about the collision event that connected these lobes.

There’s a lot more data to come back from the spacecraft. This image is, like the others, a nice “taste” of science to come. The story of the solar system, which we all thought we “knew” is changing. That’s because the formation of planets, moons, and rings depended on ancient planetestimals like this one. Far from being the lowly leftovers, these objects are a treasury of clues about what happened back when the solar system was forming. Stay tuned! And, read more about this image here.

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