![]() ![]() Like everything at Ultima Thule, how you get here depends entirely on how adventurous you’re feeling. By definition, that means that getting here is no mean feat. Locationīest pinpointed by coordinates rather than a conventional address, Ultima Thule Lodge is the Last Frontier’s last frontier. A hundred miles from any road, with just five cabins, Ultima Thule is a real escape to nature where you can quite literally go where no person has gone before. Notoriously difficult to navigate, it’s hard to believe that this majestic park is home to one of the state’s most luxurious lodges. Wrangell-St Elias National Park brings a whole new meaning to wilderness. Yet few travellers seem to make it past the well-trodden paths of Denali and the Kenai Fjords. ![]() Fully loaded, the piano-sized probe weighs a hair over 1,000 pounds and requires less power than a pair of 100-watt light bulbs to operate its equipment.Dubbed America’s Last Frontier, Alaska is home to wide-open wilderness and endless adventure. ![]() Two spectrometers will also search for charged particles in Ultima Thule's environs a radio-science instrument will measure its surface temperature and a dust counter will detect flecks of interplanetary debris. A trio of optical devices will capture images of the object in color and black-and-white, map its composition and topography, and search for gasses emanating from its surface. New Horizons will investigate Ultima with the same suite of instruments it used to study the Pluto system back in 2015. It's an archaeological expedition of cosmic scale and consequence. NASA's plan to visit one, map its features, study its makeup, detect its atmosphere (if one exists), and search it for satellites and rings is more than a flyby mission. (So far removed is Ultima Thule from the sun's warming rays, that our parent star would appear to an observer on its surface about the size that Jupiter does from here on Earth). That makes them an enticing destination for astronomers: Many of those objects aren't just ancient, they're also, astronomers think, perfectly preserved by temperatures approaching absolute zero. Kuiper Belt objects like Ultima Thule are thought to be remnants of the solar system's formation-the cosmic refuse that remained after the planets came into being some 4.6 billion years ago. Which is precisely why astronomers are so excited to study it up close. It is also, in all likelihood, very, very old. Either way, the data suggests Ultima is no more than 20 miles in diameter, dark as reddish dirt, and well within range of New Horizons' fuel supply.Ī photo of Ultima Thule, circled in yellow, captured by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on December 1, 2018. Through their observations, the team has determined that Thule (whose official designation is 2014 MU69) is either two separate objects orbiting one another at close range, or a pair of bodies that gravitated toward each other til they merged, forming the two lobes of something astronomers call a contact binary. "To even see the darn thing, you need to stack multiple images, account for the distortion between them, and subtract the stars." At 1/100th the diameter of Pluto, and 1/10,000th its brightness, Ultima Thule makes for a more elusive quarry than the erstwhile planet. "When you search for it, it looks like stars puked all over the imagery," says planetary scientist Amanda Zangari, who spent most of December collecting Ultima Thule's position and brightness measurements. In more recent images, captured by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, the object still appears as little more than a speck in a sea of much brighter specks. ![]()
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