Meet Ultima Thule: Dark as potting soil and shaped like a snowman, first images reveal
by Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times
Jan 03, 2019
3 minutes
It's rust-colored and lumpy. It's about as dark as potting soil. And shaped like a snowman.
Two days after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft hurtled past a small, frozen world 4.5 billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is finally coming into focus.
"What we are seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by a spacecraft," Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, said Wednesday as he revealed new images from the spacecraft. "These are two completely separate objects."
Although the pictures are still
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