A small visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on 1st January is now known as Arrokoth.
NASA’s New Horizons sent the first detailed images showing two spheres stuck together in the shape of a snowman.
Introduction
This object was previously known as Ultima Thule or 2014 MU69. That name was chosen to mean something like “farthest place”. But it attracted a discussion or debate because “Thule” is a word that has been associated with Nazis in the past.
NASA said that the old name, Ultima Thule (2014 MU69), was just a temporary name, but the new name is used officially and permanently.
New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement that, “The name 'Arrokoth' reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own”
Today (November 13), the mission team announced that the 34 kilometres (21 miles) wide body visited by NASA’s New Horizon space is now known as Arrokoth. Arrokoth or Ultima Thule is the farthest body visited by a spacecraft. Arrokoth means ‘sky’ in the Native American Powhatan and Algonquian languages.
This icy body orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt, approximately a billion kilometres beyond Pluto. Also, it is 6.6 billion kilometres away from Earth.
Let’s go into history, Arrokoth was discovered on 26 June 2014 by Marc William Buie (American astronomer) using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Did you know that Arrokoth orbital period is 297 Earth years? It is 132 years longer than Neptune’s orbital period, 165 years.
Photos
The first colour photo of the Kuiper Belt object, Ultima Thule reveals that the object is red, not grey, as seen from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft from a distance of 137,000 kilometres during the January 1st flyby.
The first image which was sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was quite undetailed. The surface features of the rock, or object were coming into focus in these images taken. These images were taken on 1st January, but released on the 2nd of January, from a distance of 28,000 kilometres.
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