All snowmen are to be renamed Ultima Thule. Also reminds me of my favourite potato :
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-nasa-are-paying-me-to-photograph.html
The scientists have decided to call the larger lobe "Ultima", and the smaller lobe "Thule". The volume ratio is three to one. Jeff Moore, a New Horizons co-investigator from Nasa's Ames Research Center, said the pair would have come together at very low speed, at maybe 2-3km/h. He joked: "If you had a collision with another car at those speeds you may not even bother to fill out the insurance forms."
"Our current theory as to why Ultima Thule is red is the irradiation of exotic ices." Essentially, its surface has been "burnt" over the eons by the high-energy cosmic rays and X-rays that flood space.
Less than 1% of all the data gathered by New Horizons during the flyby has been downlinked to Earth. The slow data-rates from the Kuiper belt mean it will be fully 20 months before all the information is pulled off the spacecraft.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46742298
Awful lot of trouble for some old rock in the middle of nowhere. Nobody's going back there anyway. The last time something happened there was when those rocks met, like billions of years ago, if we don't count the rock faces turning red as something happening.
ReplyDeleteMy money is on this being some kind of giant space monster poo, frozen and directionlessly wandering the furthest reaches of the solar system. Space monster to self: "...well that was quite an effort and pretty damn uncomfortable on the expulsion of that second 20 kilometer lobe, and it's also red - how embarrassing. I'll just leave this way out here where no one will ever find it..."
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Looks like a snowman, sounds kind like “Uma Thurman.”
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