New Horizons
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Ultima Thule's shape has been described as a bowling pin, then a snowman. Now, new images snapped as the probe sped away from the object show that Ultima Thule is more like a flat “pancake” stuck to a “dented walnut,” leaving astronomers puzzled as to how such a shape is even possible.
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A team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan has discovered a new class of object that has long been thought to exist in the Kuiper belt on the fringes of the solar system. It's a small body on the scale of a few kilometers.
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On January 1 the New Horizons probe whizzed past Ultima Thule, a tiny world on the fringe of the solar system. The latest image shows the object closer and in higher resolution than ever before. With that improved clarity comes some intriguing new landmarks on the rocky surface.
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More images have returned from New Horizons, bringing Ultima Thule into sharper focus. Where yesterday’s images showed a few blurry pixels that looked like a bowling pin, the new photos reveal the rocky world to be more of a “snowman” shape, confirming it as a contact binary of two large spheres.
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The New Horizons probe has successfully rendezvoused with Ultima Thule, a tiny world on the edge of the solar system. The first images have now arrived, revealing a bowling pin-shaped object that spins like a propeller.
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New Horizons is just days away from its historic flyby of Ultima Thule, a mysterious object on the fringe of the solar system. Ultima now seems to be an unexpectedly “dark” world, and while there are a number of possible explanations, none of them have any precedent in the solar system.
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The New Horizons spacecraft is just a few weeks out from a historic flyby of the Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule). After weeks of scans for any potential hazards, NASA has now given the all-clear to buzz the object on an optimal path, which will bring it in closer for a much better look.
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Mission control rejoiced when NASA’s New Horizons probe zipped past Pluto in 2015 following a nine-year voyage, but in some ways it was just getting started. After gathering data on the dwarf planet, the plucky spacecraft’s imager has now made its first detection of its next flyby target.
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NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully awoken from a planned 165-day hibernation period ahead of its historic flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, which is set to take place on New Year’s Day 2019.
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New analysis of images collected by the space probe of the dwarf planet's surface has confirmed the presence of dunes. Despite being an unlikely characteristic of an icy world with little wind, scientists also believe they have an explanation of how they formed.
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Almost three years after NASA's New Horizons deep space probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has released the first list of official names for features on the face of the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon.
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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has returned some magnificent images of the Solar System's outer reaches around Pluto, its primary target. Its latest snaps may not be its most spectacular, but are pioneering in their own way as the farthest images ever snapped away from the Earth.
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