A couple notes from when they discuss this image versus the best to come.

This image was ~50k km range 1hr to closest approach. It is 28k pixels with a resolution of 140m/pixel.
CA06 observation yet to come hopefully delivers 1M pixels at 35m/pixel.

Another presser tomorrow with perhaps better topography. Not sure when CA06 coming.

When I look at the highest-resolution picture, I see many arcuate shapes. I bet on many craters visible in the more topography-friendly images.

Have there been several contacts between the bodies?
Apparently, at first sight, the relatively circular shape of the contact area implies that the crash trajectory must have been roughly perpendicular to the surface of the bigger rock or object (volume about 3 times higher according to Alan Stern).

For superstition I did not to see the new images. Now I ask you: how much had you thought you was surprised by Ultima from 1 to 10 and how much you actually were (from 1 to 10)? many Thanks
(I see new image after yours reply I with my hand have covered the images above )

If I understand this correctly, that image of MU69 was taken from the distance of 28.000 km, and closest flyby was at 3500 km at its closest.
That means that image taken at closest approach should be about 8 times the resolution of what we are seeing now?

BTW you guys are AWESOME!!!!

7/10 A first for sure!

Youtube link to today's press conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSHOOFBxRvA

First unambiguous one? There are also 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and 25143 Itokawa as potential contact binaries.

Maybe a large crater on the smaller lobe?

Which side was imaged during closest approach?

As mentioned in the conference, what's exciting about this is that this is a "primitive" contact binary, whereas bodies like 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and 25143 Itokawa - if they are contact binaries - are evolved. Ultima Thule could prove key to understanding such bodies - whether they actually are originated as contact binaries, and if so, how they evolved from there to their current forms.

I would rather refer to hollows, bumps and wrinkles on such a primitive body like this one, if I may say...

Toma - In the press conference they said 35 m/px will be the highest resolution , so 4x today's image.

I've wondered if some of the apparent bumps are remnants of previously accreted smaller bodies. But I realize that topography may require low sun angle images.

My first analysis highlighted three possible craters...

I suspect that already happens.
Just wait until somebody calculates the insulation curves for the entire orbit.

Given the angular momentum of a binary, it should act like a gyroscope as it goes around the orbit.
In simpler terms, to understand Utima Thule, you have to think about meat on a barbecue...

UT spends half of its time rotating and roasting horizontal to the sun like a chicken on a spit.


UT spends the other half of its time rotating and roasting vertical to the sun like a donner kabob


When UT is roasting "vertically" the cryo-ice 'drippings' accumulate at the neck.
I suspec they exert quite a torque when they warm up one-quarter of an orbit later.

That is a very good point. Although the closure rate would be very low as pointed out in the presentation, if there was any residual rotation rate in one or both bodies then one could imagine an extended period of contacts and transfer of angular momentum until the two bodies settled down.

I haven't seen any explanation of how angular momentum is lost, allowing a co-rotating pair of objects to spiral together and touch.

I've wondered this too: once both bodies are tidally locked to one another (as Pluto and Charon were very quickly after formation), wouldn't they remain stable, barring a close encounter or collision with an interloper?

Eh, Sunlight? (Carl Sagan voice) Billions and billions of photons...over quadrillions and quadrillions of time intervals...

The side spinning towards the sun is blue-shifted, the side spinning away is red shifted.
More energy and thus more force, is experienced by the side hit by blue-shifted photons.

They said some material would be ejected resulting in the slow down.

I wonder how much of it is water ice. It looks like a dirty snowball - or rather a dirty snowman.

Yes, I saw those slides. But I took them to mean that first, the little bodies were ejected from the area, leaving the largest 2 circling each other. Then they spiraled down and touched. But how? Sunlight is mighty weak out there for photonic pressure to be the driving force.

Here are 3D images based on the highest resolution image and newly published images on the New Horizons "raw" images page.
My interpretation is that Ultima Thule is similar to comet 67P even at smaller than global scale with blocky regions, smoother plains and depressions.
Some of depressions could be of impact origin but I don't think that lower resolution images allows proper investigation.

Cross-eye version:
Click to view attachment

Anaglyph version:

Click to view attachment

Animated gif:

Click to view attachment

Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Daniel Machacek

Nice job - the denoising does help for perceiving depth. It still looks like the small ball is roughly spherical, while the larger ("Ultima") has a more flattish surface facing us.

From the presentation the team seems sure that Ultima and Thule accumulated separately but in near proximity and perhaps the formation of the contact binary could be taken as the logical conclusion of this accumulation. By that I mean that we should not necessarily assume that the two bodies formed a stable, mutual orbit system. Potentially, gravity was the dominant force. Given the distance from the sun solar radiation pressure would be minor and the YORP effect could be disregarded, meaning that the final rotational vector for the two bodies would primarily be the result of collisions. It may be that the ridges valleys and plateaus are the remnants of two bodies with different rotational vectors getting up close and personal.

New Horizons at Pluto was a triumph for Alan Stern's team, and NH at Ultima Thule is the cherry at the top. But there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of KBOs and only 1 New Horizons. In retrospect, NH images validate the occultation results, and one might be tempted to say that, based on those occultation results only, there is a 90% (or whatever) likelihood that Ultima Thule is a contact binary.

So what does this mean for occultation measurements going forward? And isn't this something that amateurs could assist with? What percent of KBOs are contact binaries?

Is the"crater" on Thule too big? Wouldn't an impact that large obliterate it? Maybe it's a depression form a since gone 3rd piece, or maybe a previous contact point between the two.

Or triples, or higher? Imagine closeup images of a tetrahedral configuration...

That sounds like an excellent idea for citizen science outreach -

Found and fund a "semester at NASA fellowship" dedicated to calculating asteroid, centaur and KBO occultations of stars which occur during the next six months.

Promote that "watch list" and organize monthly dark sky "picket fence parties" where astronomy clubs and collegiate/university programs deploy multiple scopes to observe the occultations.

Turns out that most of the bright spots visible in the two raw images available thus far (4:22 and 4:23 AM UTC), are indeed stars:

Click to view attachment

Bravo! You could even "sweet spot" areas to do this. Areas with good weather and infrastructure. Throw a little support in and learn about the kbo population!

I'm blown away by the results even based on the three or four images released thus far. The ingenuity and collaborative effort in achieving these results almost beggars belief.

I love HSchirmer's idea of a citizen science campaign to constrain the shape of some selected KBO's using occultation techniques with telescopes deployed in swathes across the shadow ground tracks.

It's great also that lwithin a few hours of the NYT image release, people on here have worked up their own de-noised images, stereo pairs and even conducted a search for moons.

Loving it!

Probably just artifacts but these jumped out at me:
Click to view attachment

NYT 3 downlink has completed. This one was long, and required a hand-off between Goldstone and Canberra.

Again, indicated data rates were at 1.06 kbps, 841 bps and 501 bps at various times, and signal strength seemed nominal.

So this is a LOT of data! Looking forward to seeing some of it today :-)

A quick side note to emphasize just how remarkable all this is:
The error rate of radio signals from deep space can approach on the order of 1 out of every 10 bits received and decoded, due to low received power and relatively high noise.
The way the actual data is recovered is through redundancy: "internal" convolutional forward error correction codes for each few bits, and Reed-Solomon linear error correcting codes for each block of data.
This means much more data has to be sent than is in the resulting output data stream, but the error rate can get down to only 1 bit in 10^9.

Makes me enjoy these images even more...

Will today's press conference be at the same time as yesterday's?

It says so on https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

Thomas

Yes.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Where-to-Watch.php

I don't mean to throw cold water on what seems like fundamentally an excellent idea, but I think people are underestimating what it takes to do meaningful science on KBOs. There is a reason that the Kuiper belt wasn't even discovered until the 1990s.
Careful research, planning, coordinating, training, properly equipping, analyzing of data (e.g., removal of false positives), etc. were all required for what Marc Buie did -- not just carrying some telescopes into a field and looking for a relatively bright star to blink. I recommend taking a look at what Dr. Buie had to do -- there was a reason he had to wait for the Gaia 2 data release as well as use the most powerful telescopes on and off the planet before he could do his occultation detections.

I think the same goes for essentially any of the smaller of the 1000 or so KBOs that have been discovered so far. It wouldn't be impossible, but it would take some management and specifying (and maybe supplying) minimum equipment requirements, calibration and timing standards, software tools, data reporting, etc. etc.

As for asteroid occultations, NASA and amateur astronomers have been actively searching for asteroids, and there are several projects under way if people want to help out. See, for example:
https://occultations.org/
https://occultations.org/observing/software/
http://www.asteroidoccultation.com/
http://www.asteroidoccultation.com/observations/
etc.

Having said all that, one might be able to set up a project to do the same thing that was done for MU69: do "reverse orbit" calculations to find where in the sky KB objects that will come close to New Horizon's trajectory would be in the sky today (and in coming months).
But don't wait for the NASA extended mission review to find possible follow-on targets for NH...

An area where citizen scientists could probably contribute:
There are currently multiple surveys being done (or getting started) by ground-based telescopes for various types of transients -- typically supernovae and exoplanet transits. These often aren't looking in the region of the sky where KBOs are most likely to be found, but some are.
So it might be feasible to organize something like an online "galaxy zoo" project for non-astronomers to try to detect KBOs in that sometimes nightly survey data, using some of the same techniques and software algorithms that Marc has developed for MU69.

Does anyone know of such a project already underway or being proposed?

>>EDIT 3 Jan 2019: Added the following exciting project dedicated to citizen scientists measuring stellar occultations by Trans-Neptunian Objects, already up and running:

The RECON project:
http://tnorecon.net/about-us/about-the-project/

From their website:
RECON — the Research and Education Collaborative Occultation Network — will involve students, teachers, amateur astronomers, and interested community members in a citizen science astronomy research project to study the outer solar system. We are providing telescopes, camera equipment, and training to over 40 schools and education centers across the Western United States so students and teachers from these communities can help us determine the sizes of objects out past Neptune through occultation measurements. To learn more about RECON, visit http://tnorecon.net/

Funded by the National Science Foundation, RECON is run by planetary scientists Marc Buie from Southwest Research Institute and John Keller from California Polytechnic State University.

You can sign up to join their project or request more information at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc...6b7X9g/viewform

In both dimensions. 16 times the pixels.

Stern said they were going from 28k pixels to 1M pixels, which is more like 32 times the pixels, but those numbers were... off the cuff. 140m/pixel -> 35m/pixel improvement was forecast if the closest approach images work out.

35m/pixel is an adjusted metric that includes smearing effects is it not? In side-by-side images of Manhattan representing the "simple math" resolution of the Pluto flyby vs the highest anticipated possible resolution at 2014 MU69 in a somewhat recent press conference, the actual resolution as represented was visibly FAR higher than 35m/pixel, but it was then noted that smearing will drastically reduce the actual quality.

when another images? today?

Another conference at 2:00 EST.
After that probably not for a while; solar conjunction for a few days. Be glad the encounter did not happened during conjunction, that would have been quite the tense few days. One consequence of remaining in the ecliptic! (the Voyagers are the only spacecraft beyond Earth that will never experience conjunction, is that so?)

Pioneer 11 is currently around 13 degrees out of the ecliptic, but of course we don't need to worry about loosing contact with the Pioneers.

Intro graphic up for the press briefing.

New image available on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=101...e=3&theater

Almost two perfect globes. Look how red they are!

For anyone who wants to watch on youtube, briefing is on NASA TV here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg

Started.

Amateur observations of occultations sounds like potentially a great project, but the great ghoul hanging over it is signal-to-noise ratio. In the best case, you'd have a pretty bright star being occulted, but that's going to be rare, even given the large number of KBOs. As a reference, I've imaged Makemake and the Twin Quasar and other ~Mag 17 objects with a 235mm telescope but haven't yet succeeded in capturing Eris from my light-polluted location. In doing so, I'm taking images with no particular limit of exposure duration, whereas an occultation study would hinge upon time resolution. To observe an occultation, you need the time resolution to be sufficient for the telescope in question to capture the occulted star with high signal to noise ratio.

Pluto, and therefore Ultima Thule, are both very much in the plane of the Milky Way now, where occultations of arbitrarily dim stars will happen frequently. In other parts of the sky, the number of occultations would be scarce. This was pure luck that the geometry worked in our favor. The all-sky average frequency will be much lower. Of course, the Milky Way would be a good place to focus any such efforts, and it's not tiny, but it only crosses the ecliptic in two relatively small patches of a big sky.

So the devil's in the details: How many KBOs are occulting stars, of what brightness, how often, and how big do the telescopes have to be to make the measurement? Given enough time, the opportunities have to be there.

"The king of the Kuiper Belt, the planet Pluto...."
"Pluto ... Ultima Thule ... This is the difference between a planet and a planetesimal."

Yep, this is definitely Alan Stern talking