Ultima Thule
By Cosmic Cairns on November 17, 2020 7:52 pm
I recently watched a Nova episode about the New Horizons mission. The first half of it was mostly about the flyby of Pluto, which was itself totally awesome. Then the second half was about what came next. They didn't actually have a concrete plan, but it was a situation like we've got this spacecraft out here in a region we're probably not going to revisit anytime soon, we know there are a ton of other objects out here, let's see if we can find one and go visit it. They ended up successfully flying by a peanut shaped object only about 36 km long that they nicknamed Ultima Thule. It is currently the furthest object from Earth that a human-made spacecraft has flown by at close range. The fact that they were able to find an object they didn't even know existed, pinpoint where its location would be at the correct time, alter the course of the New Horizons spacecraft to intercept it, and beam pictures back to Earth is really amazing to me. I'm in awe of human ingenuity, which is good to remember because there are far too many times I find myself in awe of human stupidity. Anyway, this is my humble little musical tribute.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)