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Oct. 16, 2021
In January 2019, the automatic interplanetary station New Horizons, which continued to study objects in the Kuiper belt, flew past the asteroid Arrokot, also known as (486958) 2014 MU69 and Ultima Thule. The asteroid was at a distance of 6.5 billion km from Earth. Thus, the asteroid Arrokot is currently the most distant object in the solar system that has ever been visited by a spacecraft.
Asteroid 2014 MU69 was discovered with the Hubble Orbiting Telescope in 2014. This discovery partially solved the problems of the New Horizons mission, since after studying Pluto and its satellites, no objects were known to which the probe could go. At the beginning of 2015, Arrocot was the only object that the New Horizons apparatus could have guaranteed to reach (taking into account possible errors).
The first name of the asteroid is Ultima Thule, after a mythical island in northern Europe. However, in 2019, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially assigned the name of the asteroid "Arrokoth", which means "sky" in the language of the Pohatan Indians (Virginia). Arrocot is a contact deuce, about 32 × 20 km in size, reddish in color.
Most of the asteroid was named Ultima, the smaller part - Thule. Ultima has dimensions 22 × 20 × 7 km, Tula - 10 × 6x2 km. Arrocoth's center of mass is located inside the larger part of the asteroid. The interior is probably composed of a mixture of ices of various gases, water, and rock material.
All groups of scientists studying it note that the surface of the asteroid is uniformly red, very cold and covered with methanol ice, complex organic compounds, with which the red color is possibly associated. According to scientists, methanol could be formed from water and methane ices when irradiated with cosmic rays. Most likely, Arrocot was formed from two separate progenitor objects in the earliest stages of the formation of the solar system.
Source: Moscow Planetarium.
Related links:
ROSCOSMOS Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/32979/
Moscow Planetarium: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/moskovskiy-planetariy/
Asteroid: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/asteroid/
Images, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/Moscow Planetarium/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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