At first glance, the mysterious space rock that NASA’s New Horizons zoomed by on New Year’s day looked like a lumpy snowman, or maybe a misshapen space peanut. Now, a new set of photos reveal that the space rock is flatter than initially thought — more pancake, really, than peanut.
The space rock, called 2014 MU69, is located 4.1 billion miles away from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, a massive stretch of frigid objects that orbit the Sun at the edges of the Solar System. During its flyby of the 21-mile-wide rock, New Horizons snapped photos with its two cameras and collected 50 gigabits of data with its onboard instruments.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical…
from The Verge – All Posts http://bit.ly/2BD49np
via IFTTT