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Ultima Thule in Sight! New Horizons Probe Snaps New Photo of Its Target
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | December 10, 2018 03:07pm ET
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home another glimpse of the distant, icy body it will zoom past just three weeks from now.
The small object Ultima Thule swims amid a sea of distant stars in the new composite photo, which New Horizons snapped with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera at around midnight EST (0500 GMT) on Dec. 1.
At the time, the probe was 24 million miles (38.7 million kilometers) from Ultima and more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth, mission team members said. [NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]
"As the New Horizons spacecraft closes in on its target, Ultima Thule is getting brighter and brighter in the LORRI optical navigation images," New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. "It's now standing out much more clearly among the sea of background stars."
More:
https://www.space.com/42679-new-horizons-ultima-thule-photo.html?utm_source=notification