Arrokoth scaled one in one million

0 reviews

tato_713

@tato

A small KBO visited by the New Horizons probe in its extended mission.

376

updated January 16, 2022

Description

PDF

I made this model mixing the stereographic model from the south face of Arrokoth from the supplementary material of Spencer (2020) and the shape model from Stern (2019) published in the 3D Asteroid catalogue, using MATLAB R2016a. The New Horizons probe made the flyby of the object on the new year of 2019, after visiting Pluto system. The visible side when the probe flyby it, was the southern hemisphere by the right hand rule convention.

The file's names explained: name_1_x_10_y.stl is 1 : x* 10^y. So _1_6_10_7 is 1:600000000 or one in 60 million.

486958 Arrokoth "Ultima Thule"

Arrokoth (2014MU69) is the farthest object visited by an space probe, and the first one to be discovered after the launch of the probe, and not during the flyby, unlike Ida's moon Dactyl, or the Jupiter's moon Thebe, that were unknown before the approach to them. It is small for a Trans Neptunian Object, although being comparable in size with the biggest Near Earth Asteroids (like Eros). This is because the observational bias, objects beyond the orbit of Neptune are more difficult to see because of the distance. It is one of the best example of a contact binary, composed of two flat parts. The bigger one is nicknamed "Ultima", seems to be composed of many smaller objects; and the other is called "Thule", that is likely to be a single wider object with at least one big crater (on the visible part). Like many other TNOs, the surface of Arrokoth is expected to be relatively undisturbed since its accretion in the early Solar System.