The quest to find the beginning of our solar system just got real. NASA is gathering information and taking photos of a 21-mile long snowman looking mass that sits four billion miles away from Earth. NASA is able to do that thanks to its New Horizons spacecraft that left Earth in 2006 on the way to Jupiter and Pluto. New Horizons completed its Jupiter flyby in 2007 and in 2015 the spacecraft did a flyby of Pluto.
But NASA wanted to go where no tech-savvy spacecraft went before. So the spacecraft left Pluto and headed for the Kuiper Belt which sits about a billion miles away from Pluto. The Kuiper Belt is home for Solar System after birth, according to NASA scientists. One object in the Kuiper Belt is a 21-mile long mass. NASA calls that mass Ultima Thule. The first incredible photos of Ultima Thule show two spheres that bonded into one mass.
The principal investigator for New Horizons, Alan Stern, told reporters Ultima Thule is about the same size as Washington D.C. New Horizons is gathering information about this ancient piece of solar system junk as it flies by it at 32,000 mph. Stern thinks the information they receive will change planetary science. Examining one of the building blocks of the solar system is a tech advancement for the record books, according to Stern.
New Horizons is a techno time machine with Starship Enterprise type technology, according to NASA officials. The high-resolution images of Ultima Thule show two objects bonded together due to a gentle collision between the two objects shortly after the birth of the Solar System, according to NASA. They stay together thanks to mutual gravity.
New Horizon’s geophysics and geological investigator, Jeff Moore, thinks Ultima Thule may be the most primitive object seen by any spacecraft. Ultima Thule is one of the building blocks for the Solar System. That means this snowman looking object that hangs in space four billion miles away from Earth played a role in everything that exists in the Solar System now.
But NASA isn’t the only space agency making history. The Chinese just landed their Chang’4 spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That technological feat gives the Chinese space age bragging rights. China is now a major player in the space race right behind the United States and Russia. The next Chinese mission will send astronauts to the dark side of the moon. That will put China on equal footing with the United States, according to Chinese news reports.
