It’s known as Ultima Thule — “beyond the known world” — but on Tuesday a tiny planet got a little less mysterious. NASA’s…
It’s known as Ultima Thule — “beyond the known world” — but on Tuesday a tiny planet got a little less mysterious.
NASA’s New Horizons probe successfully conducted the farthest-ever fly-by of an object in space when it sped past Ultima Thule in the first minutes of 2019.
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” announced the mission’s operations manager, Alice Bowman, as signals from the probe reached earth hours later. Stored on board are close-up pictures of the planet that’s less than 20 miles wide, and four billion miles from the sun. The first images, just a few pixels across, arrived Tuesday morning and revealed a planet shaped like dog-bone, a peanut or a bowling pin, depending on your interpretation.
