 All right, welcome to the October webinar of the NASA night sky network this month We welcome home or can umerhan to our webinar will share with us the new horizons missions and explorations beyond Pluto dr. Orkin Umerhan's research focuses on evolutionary processes both on planetary surfaces and in protoplanetary disks He joined the new horizons geology and geophysics Investigation team way back in 2013 and did a lot of them mathematical modeling for The flyby through the Pluto system. He regularly writes blog posts for NASA about new horizons and recently he's Started to do some work with the city Institute as well as some other organizations. So without further ado Please welcome Orkin Okay, let's see here. So I am now sharing my There we go Hi everyone so I'm glad everyone is here to listen to me talk about our flyby of MU-69 and So I will Just get right into it. So we We went through a very exciting time in the last year with new horizons as you know new horizons it's continued out out of the solar system and just recently has Passing through what's known as the Kuiper belt and of course this was something that we've been planning for for many years And so I want to tell you about what we saw on January 1st, 2019 and Why it is so important what we saw In terms of getting insights into the origins of the solar system, which for me, it's a beautiful a beautiful experience because it started it's basically it's folded in Many of the work that I used to do long before I became a geologist because I originally work on questions of the formation of the solar system and This body and bodies like it in the what's called the cold kaipel belt, which I'll talk about some more Is one of the first keys Bits of evidence that are will help us constrain Narrative we have about how the first planetesimals formed which ultimately lead to the first planets. So without further ado Do a little bit of a review of the New horizons itself and So as you know in on January 19th in 2006 and horizons launch on that five rocket and it was the fastest rocket Flight ever and that's because there was basically nothing on top of it except for a very BDBD little thing called the New Horizons spacecraft. Of course, the speed was necessary to get us to out to the Kuiper belt Long before all of us die I mean, if you know what I mean, it takes a long time to go out for out to 40 39 Astronomical units or even further out. So, you know, there was a lot of decisions made about what kind of payload to put on And so let me just quick reminder New horizons the payload itself is the size of a little grand piano and it has several Cameras and instruments on there the ones that are of importance for us Is the long range reconnaissance imager basically the nice said 10 inch Black and white camera and what we call Lori and together with it. We had a couple of couple of color cameras One called M Vic and the other one called Lisa Lisa is important because it allows us to develop to extract spectra On a 256 by 256 grade, which is very important. Obviously for understanding what stuff we're looking at is made of so and And of course, there are other instruments on it as well Think called the Ralph and I mean Ralph is actually the combination of M Vic and Lisa And then there's the Alice instrument, which is an ultraviolet detector, which didn't really play a role in the mission That we just had but played an important role in the Pluto mission The Pluto Sharon flyby There's the Rex instrument is a radio antenna and that's actually kind of an important one as well and all folds in and a couple of other instruments involved in the measurement of dust particles in the And cosmic ray particles in the system itself so as you know in 2006 the launch occurred and It did a quick flyby of the Jupiter's Abadie assist and then he here in this artist's rendition The red trajectory set it towards an encounter with Pluto system in July 2015 and Was a very exciting time and quite revolutionary and we are still trying to make sense of the data That we acquired from that even to this day and it's probably a lifetime work But that's a story for another time Maybe I'll come back another day and give you a little follow-up on what we discovered about Pluto because lots of new things have been Lots of new things have had light shed on it because of this mission and so it's in the developing story, but nonetheless Of course, we had planned the spacecraft to continue on its way out of the solar system and But it was right prior to the encounter with the Pluto that we actually discovered this object that was kind of in the trajectory of The spacecraft as it is and so I'll get to that in a moment, but just as a quick little remind the Pluto system as is written here seen through the eyes of new horizons and Of course, there was the this ice planet. I don't call it a dwarf planet I am a partisan. I guess in the matters It barks like a planet. It acts like a planet. It's got all the science planet and for my purpose It's a planet and it it's a it's a binary pair Component Sharon and one of the things I'd like to point out to people one of the things that people kind of get It's hard to get their heads around The Pluto Sharon system is really that it's a double planet system And we don't have examples of that anywhere in the solar system and as far as we are concerned as far as we know Other exoplanet systems have not yet been discovered to be a double planet system So this is one of these also such a beautifully unique system in and of its own right that it's literally Bodies that are of comparable size Sharn faith the size of Pluto, but by comparison to the other four little critters for a bit around it It's basically You know, it's the dominant folks in town with the bunch of us stragglers kind of held behind that word of these kinds come from probably something having to do with the remnants of this Formation of the system itself. Of course, this is a lot of ongoing science scientific speculation as well as inquiry and Analysis as well. So as you know in science as we know always know that people come up with a speculation about something or another and We try to see if the data fits the story and if not then we have to change the story Starts making sense of the data that you see. So it's an ongoing story and actually it's very exciting So I noticed I work and I noticed something on the one slide a couple of slides back and I noticed that the Orientation you have there seem to show that Pluto is fairly close to the node at which the two planes the Pluto's orbital plane and the ecliptic plane are pretty much co-incident there and so Was that known, you know specifically so had there been delays on the on the mission What would that have done? The mission was designed in light of the possibility of us continuing on to the Kuiper belt and We knew that of course I'll show you a little bit later Kuiper belt objects span the full spectrum of Inclinations, but we I had our eyes on the cold classical Kuiper belt and I'll talk about that in a minute and so it everything kind of put together and there was a little bit of serendipity also in the location of Where Pluto was going to be in terms of being close to the ecliptic plane but That's actually part of the planning and how we try we try to maximize all their possibilities So by the way, you know a good book to read is Alan Stern's book chasing new horizons and Dale Crookshanks book came out recently and there's a nice write-up about it in the The New York review of books. I'm sure you all have some of you probably heard of it It's out in this there's a nice review of the two books itself But chasing new horizons in particular is a very gripping story. So I'm not paid to plug it, but It's a good book. I highly recommend it Right so So if I shall carry on so you got highlights of the fluto fly by and They're you know, it's just it's an amazing place We saw examples of nitrogen ice glaciers nitrogen ice flows Things called the bladed terrain This example of the fact that the two plant at the two bodies starkly different in terms of One is basically geologically active. The other one is not and they're all kind of abutted next to each other The the the brightness contrast is also another very real thing that comes up with the that's a consequence of the things we've discovered We see examples of Here on this panel here. You see all kinds of different types mineral I mean molecules that are frozen onto the surface and their distribution Different from one another you have methane you have nitrogen you have Carbon monoxide and then you have water and their distribution on the surface is very different and it tells you something about the thermal climate on the surface and its interaction with the atmosphere and It has really opened up this in a very stark way the study of ice bodies and natural climates and the natural thermal physical and The logical conditions that these places provide and one of the things I just want to point before I get into the good stuff of our of our recent encounter is that and I had pointed this out before These cold bodies which sit at about 50 Kelvin 40 Kelvin 50 Kelvin Given the kinds of What we call volatile materials like methane and like nitrogen and CO That temperature and though the conditions that are are present on the surface are one Make them be near their triple points and the triple one where It doesn't take very much to turn one bod from a solid into a gas or into a liquid and Only a couple cases in the solar system that has this example. Obviously one of them is earth because earth's Surfaces has a lot of water and water can exist in three phases and Mars Kind of gets close to it not quite, but you can get Mars Existing near its triple point for CO2 as an example, but on meth on Pluto You've got both not and Carbon monoxide sitting close to their triple point. So it leads to very interesting geological features So I I always love talking about that because that always captures my imagination about what's going on But let's get to the star of the show. So as we were getting ready to do Getting ready for our encounter. We had several are called operation readiness tests ORT's and an ORT is essentially a time when we all get together and We practice how we're going to actually behave How we're going to do the science what kinds of questions we're going to ask and so on and so forth when the day of closest encounter comes So it was during one of our ORT tests that one of our team members Came with this discovery and it's discovery and I'm showing you over here was the discovery of this body And you could see it there kind of streaming by in the green That is essentially on track with Pluto's trajectory with New Horizons trajectory past Pluto So it was very exciting and it became called 2014 MU 69 which was later called ultimatule and it to us This was I think this was in September 2014. So this Approximately nine months before our actually closest encounter that we found that this body Was on its path now. I make it sound easy. It wasn't easy. We had to use Hubble Space Telescope time to actually dedicated time To actually scan that part of the Kuiper belt to see if there was anything there and we pleaded and we begged and we asked the Director of Hubble itself for his discretionary time and he gave it to us and we use that and we got really In fact, we found this and we found one other along the way. So we had a choice But turned out this one was required less of fuel usage to get to so We discovered this The proposals were made and then we declared there to be a follow-up mission after Pluto. We decided we were going to come after this object so This is that this is a beautiful little story and I'll try to summarize as best I can We have a fellow on our team He's at the Lowell Observatory. His name is Mark viewing and he set out on Doing what's called a ground-based Occultation campaign Since we knew where the body was and what its trajectory was based on those previous images We Went out and tried to basically we they they organized this team involving a bunch of amateur astronomers To go out to various sites on the on the on the planet at designated times and what we were going to do We were aiming towards trying to catch Ultima Pule pass in front of some background star that you can see here on the left You can see there's some background star just kind of hanging and then You see it kind of blink in and out again so This is this is the principle and we were what the plan was is to catch MU 69 actually doing this to one or two or several other bodies of stars In the course of the next few months Doing an occultation measurement can tell you a lot And one of the things that we learned from the very early occultation measurements that The body itself Was actually kind of low bait and lumpy In some weird-looking way We had some estimates that maybe it was about 30 to 40 kilometers in length But what you see here is this little picket fence sort of pattern And the picket fence pattern tells you and what is this picket fence pattern representing? what it's representing is Observatories on the ground and what were those observatories there were individual teams of two Taking out 12 inch celes throns out to places in africa in south africa and in um gana and in South america because there were these various sites where Actually kind of catch it in occultation and they were set up about 10 to 15 kilometers separated each other in latitude So the idea is we will catch this thing Make a shadow on this object But we don't know where that shadow is going to fall But if we have enough As you can see with these white basically this like white picket fence sort of trajectory Then we might be able to not only catch it. We might be able to say something about what it's shaped like So this was done On uh, it was quite an expensive operation. It cost about a million dollars But it was a proof of concept that showed astronomers Could get involved with directly making measurements The shape and and and quality of the smallest objects in our solar system that are Sort of gravitationally bound Did you guys do this through iota? Is that the group you worked with or did you work with a different group? No, we it was uh It was a group that mark bewey put together at a call To several of the amateur astronomy organizations in the individual countries that were involved And so they brought out and and so a bunch of people came up and so Or and we provided the telescopes about so since we didn't know A priori how big this object really was we just know it's possibly going to blink this thing up Think of it is you can imagine the shadow. It's like a shadow of an airplane Passing over the ground right if you're in the right place, you'll see the sun be blocked out Otherwise you won't right so we have to get about 20 bit the telescopes out there We provided the telescopes and they provided a lot of the amateur astronomers in location to help us with the project Which is pretty cool. God. It's just like it's big like, you know Sort of collective activity So we saw this and I will return to this in a minute and well minute in about like maybe 15 minutes But this is what we um, we predicted that this is what it's going to be personally ask me I was like these guys want something wrong. I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it I was kind of a doubter, but i'm a scientist. I'm paid to be a doubter It was okay. So let's carry on Little bit of background and i'll whip through some of these slides very quickly New horizons was set to enter into the region called the cold classical now What is the cold classical kuiper belt cold classical kuiper belt? It's this location out in the solar system out between about 40 to about 48 49 astronomical units And it's known to and it was had been theorized to hold particle planetesimals or small bodies Kuiper itself many years ago and it remained sort of a theoretical sort of prediction But it was had not been actually observed to actually hold any significant number of bodies until only the early 2000s So which is part of the reason why this is so exciting now the cold kuiper belt It's consistent of what's called the cold kuiper belt There's the hot kuiper belt object and when i'm plotting here Is a part of the number of bodies as a function of radius and the vertical axis is is its inclination Back to the The the ecliptic so these are these are bodies that like pluto sit at really high angle Or high inclined orbits So there's the high classical and the cold classical the cold classicals tend to lurk down Towards the i mean there's some spread but there's clearly a A different population. There's also a little difference in their colors and so on but i won't give you that detail Uh, necessarily now. I just want to point out two other things. There is a little kid There's a group of bodies that includes pluto. They're called the Plutinos Little pluto's okay and little pluto's they uh sit at the three to two orbital residents between Neptune and and uh, and i'm my my brain is uh Uh, basically it's a three two orbital residents between, uh, neptune and that location in the Uh in terms of its capillary orbit and what that does is it it kicks the orbits because it's in resonance And it causes things to either pile up and float up basically they flare out and it's an orbital dynamic sort of phenomenon anyways These particle populations here there are other populace similar types of populations called for instance the centaurs and they they are associated with the jupiter system And in the saturnian system as well anyway, so just kind of give you a picture of the kinds of uh, uh This just distribution of particles at and sources. We were headed towards these and why is this important and i'll tell you real quick This is important from the standpoint of formation In the in the following sense the the stuff that sits here in this region is not excited by these orbital resonances so these these bodies hold the best promise for some kind of Deep insight towards what the conditions were At the formation of the solar system because if you think about it All of the bodies in the solar system have been cooked have been processed have been smashed up. It's been Churned up. It's been regurgitated. You know all kinds of things have been going on based on just the evolution of them itself, but appear to be The best candidates For bits and bobs left over from when the solar system itself was formed four and a half billion years ago And these bodies hopefully and we expect them to give us more information about Giving us insights into the actual formation of bodies themselves. They're almost like the tarot Almost like the holy grail you might want to if you want to kind of throw that kind of thing out there So let me pause here if there are any questions Maybe I should take them because now i'm going to rip through all of our pictures and then Yeah, this would be a great time to have some comments or questions from All of you and uh while we're waiting. I think that this idea of criminal resonances Is really interesting and i'd love to know more about why it is that the lack of um, the resonance with uh Neptune or whatever they're in resonance with is an important um Why that's important so yeah, so the i mean it's important that if they're they're What we have to understand Is that the bodies like the plutinos these may have been pushed here into these orbits Because what happens when when you get into this resonance you stay locked you get excited But you get locked into this zone, which is why you see so many bodies kind of floating around here These bodies may or may not have been formed at this location Let's say for instance at I don't know. Let's say it says 39 and a half a u location of where pleato They may or may not have been formed there But they get actually drift and get locked into this position because of the orbital resonance itself, okay uh, so These bodies on the other hand, which don't have a very strong orbital resonance associated with it Are likely to be bodies that were formed in in situ and didn't actually Drift from any other place So as a control If we want to know what things were made of You want to go to a place where there's not a lot of processing going on And you want to be able to say for sure that this hasn't been The bodies here didn't come from anywhere else Okay, we did end up with a yeah, we did end up with another question here And so we have a question is sedna and I guess Perhaps some of the other Objects that are out there. Are those a cold or a hot Regeneration body where with that? Yeah, well like how does a sedna form? I'm laughing Because I was just had a three weeks ago where guys are To get into fist fights over this question. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but that They're they said not such a freak object in the sense of it shouldn't even be there But it is What led to it being formed in situ the way that it is and stuff there's a number of issues that are at play It's not clear, but this effect has some role in it somehow But it that we're still trying to parse the The chronology of that type of story and of course story about Nine Which is really should be planet 10 the mystery planet that's way out in the deep deep deep deep Or cloud itself Or approaching the or cloud itself and the stuff that the Constantine vatigen for instance at caltech has been working on with mike brown The the fact that we see all these bodies out there like nobody knows how they're made so But there's a lot of theories. I would love to get into it some more, but great. I may run out of time Yeah, we probably will but that's okay. So christ noticed and in looking at this like he he says that he notices that The cold classical seemed to be following a trend towards the northeast And what would make these cold classicals compared to the lighter blue dots that are in the same place We're right. So, um, we do the cold classicals have a particular Color thing that's associated with them that are distinct from what are Hot classicals this perhaps this diagram. It doesn't really do it a lot of service To distinguish between the two But that we know that the this color coding that's associated with the cold classicals tend to show them to be closer Towards the ecliptic while the hot classicals They show that their mean sort of drifts up in the Of course, but there's a little bit of mixing and no stories ever clean. So right I didn't steal the cookie from the cookie jar It was really something else that happens, you know, it's that kind of story There's a lot of nuances that might have gotten but we do see that there's a distinction There are two different populations and their means tend to show different Locations in terms of their inclination. So but beyond that, it's currently under scientific debate All right Okay, so, um, so this is just another nice little picture Uh, kind of giving a sense of your little artist diagram when we decided we made the plans at given everything that I was going to be our target and that um, it uh fly by would be on January 19th and uh, January 1st, 2019 And um, I don't know if anybody out there are fans of certain science fiction stories and now it's been made into a a thing I think Suddenly all of us here on Pluto All of us all of us Pluto guys suddenly became belters and we are very proud of it we are We owned the Kuiper belt and we and and we have Become so enraptured by the mystery And the the answers that it might hold that So almost overnight when we when decided when nasa approved of us going there Or you know, basically nasa management said, okay, go ahead Uh, we overnight became a very proud uh, outlanders as it were. So I just kind of thought I might like that and I'm Uh, I'm I'm a big fan. So anyway, so Let's talk about the flybype So, uh, ultimatulia is a very challenging flyby because the time Is about a hundred times smaller than Pluto was, uh, even though we are We're going to fly closer to it than we ever did to Pluto. It requires navigational position that had never been done before Um on top of that Know how far away that this I mean where exactly this target was located So we're dealing with a lot of uncertainties in terms of like, you know, what is this thing? And where is it located and how we're going to point the cameras? So that's another big challenge because we we're flying blind And so we have to come up with a strategy to be able to scan to make sure we catch it So, you know, you could be lucky or you could be horribly unlucky one of those things We don't know what the environment is like. We don't know if there's debris out there. We could you're going at 13 kilometers a second You know, it's something the size of uh, you know, a skin flake could cause major problems on a camera If you smack it into it that at that speed the other problem is that the body is very very dark and And of course we had other issues in terms of power management between when we saw Pluto and now we've eaten up a lot of battery power so Let's talk a little bit about optical navigation. So, uh, here we have so we had a team of guys Um and ladies, I mean just saying the generic, you know humans, right? Manning the stations and taking images of of approach, you know months and months out before And the whole aim is to make sure that we Other objects along the way so make sure we don't hit it hit them And uh, and to also get a better sense of where the body is located So on the left here, you have a raw image on the right middle. You have a processed image and on the right you have the uh, this the the what's known about the background subtracted and boom and you can see here with the red bits that the shows the location of of uh MU69 sort of drifting across the screen keep been in mind people are wondering why is it drifting? Because we kept the star field fixed in the background and we're watching Of the body itself because the body is moving with respect to the background star. That's how we found it in the first place um, I was uh directly involved with putting together the uh, the trajectory sequence itself I mean, obviously it was me and about the 15 14 15 of us others and we had to we had to vie between battling factions between The guys who are geologists and the composition guys and so on. Okay, we're we're out. We actually get along together I can imagine the point is To sequence our observation in a way to get the maximum science return So you can imagine Sitting down and getting a bunch of opinionated scientists together to agree on something It's it's a process that requires good management and luckily we have a lot of very Very good people who knew how to take everyone's input and turn it into something that everyone's happy about If only our politics in this country were similar, but of course one could only wish so anyways, you get the idea that This is the white shows the trajectory sequence Each little tick mark here represents a 15 minute sequence so you can imagine the whole everything we're going to do is is To a three hour sort of section in total, which is pretty gnarly when you think about it You got to be dialed everything has got to be dialed to the point where There's there's no room for error and yeah, yeah, so this Force trading and there's a lot of worrying. This is what we're paid to do. We're paid to worry And we're good at worrying and keeping our head straight at the same time So that's kind of essentially what the sequence plan was so on approach Closest approaches around here, but we had to make sure that our best color images We're taking at certain points. You have to maximize the way the sun is striking the surface and so on you can imagine so in terms of sort of a more of a perspective view you can see that We have a new horizons passing across Imagine it's the United States and you're on your pass and cross like Along the eastern seaboard and the Atlantic and the ultimate two lades is clear. We're clearly across The the side the expanse of the United States So and remember we're looking at a body at that distance, which is about approximately 20 to 40 Besides we still weren't sure how big this thing would be so it's you know, it's that's not trivial We have to be able to point very carefully With some great pieces. Oh, yeah, you see so there it pops up. You can see the of course. This is obviously not necessarily Oh, this is actually probably about half the size but gives you a side a sense of the Of the other thing. Oh, this was a nice little thing somebody somewhere Who was enamored by our project? sent this to Alan Stern This was about about two months before now. It was quite beautiful artistically done Uh, you know, sort of a new year's new horizons type of thing and it was pretty cool. So We had this floating and we had this up in all of During during our mission control activities So we like all over the place and where we were at the john's hop to university Anyways, I thought that kind of cool. And by the way, I'm happy to make these slides available to you all So you can talk about that. Okay, so As we're coming in so Pages of ultimatulia. So this is this is literally okay. This is literally about Uh, I don't know. I would say 36 hours before closest approach Maybe a little less So on the left image The body now with the cameras on board was resolving something that was about I don't know. You see how many pixels that is, you know, eight pixels across Of course, you know, you're like, oh, what is this thing? Right? And then we go through this process of image processing decombolution and all this black magic that Our friends like Todd Lauer does over at no al And uh, and so we knew that well, it looks pretty elongate Uh, oh, yeah, it says here 37 hours before closest approach. So at this point the range to ultimatulia is about, uh One million miles or so Next day almost 24 hours later. This is what it looks like. You see the actual images and Pixels themselves. This is a processed image. So this is now, uh, we we were Get a good sense that this thing is about 20 about 35 kilometers Massomenos And so we were like, all right. Well, I guess they were right. It's probably bilobate That's when I had to pay my dollar to my friend All of the white because I bet him I was like, oh, there must be wrong. So I was wrong. So happily So um, and then and this was the morning of uh, january 1st It was like about a year before when this image came down and of course we were like, ah What's it coming? No, no, actually it's more Or it was early mid-morning when we actually got the the downlink from the uh, the image from the New rising itself. So it looks like this not very impressive, but it blew our minds you can see Look like a snowman if we were jokingly calling it the snowman Uh, so it's interesting what difference a day makes Uh, this was the moment this was the actual moment where um, We the the image downloaded on my and I was actually might might my chair Where I was working right next to him. So I got up jumped around over there And that was the image that was when you my friend stewart robbins. He's a crater counter master crater counter of the world He was like, oh my god, it's here. It's here. It's here. So we all jumped in and this nice photo was taken and as you can see there was some leftover action from the night before and um This is the best view of ultimatulay This is the image that came down a couple weeks later and the reason for that is we had to Our first images had to come down in jpeg compression but Because it takes so much time to download all that data and this is the image that came down About about two weeks later. So I'm we're kind of cheating here a little bit. I'm showing you What it actually looks like based on the high resolution images This was the actual image of the body at seven minutes before close approach and You can tell we were looking at something that we had never seen before We had never even imagined we would see anything like this before and it uh, it it, uh, Really confounded all of us and it continues to come found There are many things I want to point out and I think this would be a good time But take a pause and take some questions move on And I do want to mention that we're at a quarter to seven and uh, we are not going to have A traditional q&a at the very end. And so if you have any questions or comments, uh, now would be a good time And I can by the way, I can I can try to speed this up go through the rest of this the next 10 minutes I'm sorry. I waxed too much on this but now we're good. Sorry fabulous Um, how why did what's the naming what is ultimate tool and why don't you pronounce? Oh Gosh, that's a hard one. Yeah, um, so the the the, uh The metaphor the comes from It's a historically based thing from the days of the romans Where ultimately it was supposed to be the uh represent the furthest northern outpost so the furthest northern extent and it was supposed to represent uh from From the vantage point of The norse tribes as well, but it's as well as the romans Of pushing the boundaries and going towards new horizons, right? That's kind of like the theme and um, and so that the that was the tentative name given to it and that was uh You know based on some nasa management decisions including people like alan stern and so forth but unfortunately as some people know that there's uh very negative uh connotations related to ultimate hule and things uh having to do with the Nazi race ideology and I can assure you there was no such connection here And uh that although it was an unfortunate thing that people decided to Uh put their finger on this and say oh, this has got something to do and that's something to do with that I mean, yeah, you have to understand that even a guy alan stern Who is uh, you know He's a a He's of the jewish, uh ethnicity and he was fully aware of this and he and his view on a point on this question It's time. We take back what's been uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, um Coopted by people who have very uh poor ideas of humanity So that wasn't the reason why it was chosen But when this came up, you know, we had to sort of make clear You know, we had to point people out the fact that this is not So, uh, but it's meant to represent pushing of the boundaries going to the where we've not gone before and kathy, uh What and looked it up in the oxford dictionary and that discovered that it means a distant unknown region The extreme limit of travel and discovery That's right. This is so and and and it originated from These it came from the romans themselves uh in terms of their you know, uh Track of their expeditions out to the furthest northern reaches and so on. So yeah, it's that that type of uh merging with us I'll I'll stop talking. So we have a couple of uh questions here. We have one from richard about He notes that there's a bright ring between Altima and tully and so are there any thoughts about the bright ring? So let me let me get to that that's segue into the next Uh my my next slide so Yeah, so, uh, let me Some of you probably already read what I have over here um Yes, so, uh, so at some point when we decided that Well, it's obvious it's two bodies and we're gonna call it ultimate tulae So we decided to call the small guy tulae and the other one ultima right ultimate, right? I don't know. It's kind of silly, but I was there at the moment where uh, jeff more Who's the head of the geology and jeff's image team? He just made this blanket decoration that shall be ultima and that shall be tulae So we all had a good laugh of course because it made perfect sense So the here here are these uh the two bodies and uh one slightly larger thing Are there you can see the dimensions given to you and these are the diameter The radial dimensions. Yes ultimate tulae has this bright collar. Um, it's albedo is About 50 percent larger than the albedo of the rest of the body What is it? Why is it there? What is it telling us? We've come up with lots of ideas and I'll say a few words about what might be but right At the current stage we have no idea as to why this is there is this I mean we have ideas But we there's no way to select between the various ideas and I'll say a few words about that down one There are other regions that also have these uh bright white brighter albedo reflections pattern as well Uh the typical albedo of this body though on average about 0.06 so it's pretty dark darker than charon has a high obliquity Which is uh was a mystery Um in terms of why is this body not showing a light curve as we were approaching it It didn't show very much light variations and that's because its obliquity is almost 90 degrees 99 degrees so it was showing very little variation as we were coming because it was basically spinning like a propeller Approaching it which is kind of freakish. You're like why why is this and it has this strong It has this very strong inclination almost like the inclination of uranus Uh, there's not I'm not saying that they're connected, but I'm just saying that it has that kind of the qualitative similarity Uh, let's see uh 15.9 hour rotation period Uh, that would had been a question of the debate for quite a while We didn't know what it was but it wasn't only until about uh about 12 hours before closest approach We finally were able to to assess that it was that we thought it could be 15.9 Or it could have been twice that or it could have been twice that Because we couldn't quite tell based on the way that the light curve was showing us. What was the actual uh uh frequency of the uh Of what we're seeing we had to actually see it for ourselves to see it spinning to be able to actually select it now this Is a picture of on the left. This is a beautiful one. You see the image As we are approaching it on the left is the actual images, but blown up to on the same scale, but Kind of giving us the sense of what it was doing as we were approaching it on the right is the actual image Uh, we derotated it Uh, just to kind of give you a Uh what it was looking like just to give you a sense of like how it was probably spinning in the rotator in the rotating frame of the body itself so That's pretty cool. Um, that took a lot of work to get that right and then just we can tell we can actually construct something about it's uh About its shape on the back side. I'll talk a little bit about that. Oh my goodness. I'm running out of time. All right So this is Another view of ultimate tulle. It's kind of dancing around. This is what a stereoscopic view Um, I I have actually one where you can do the two images, but I didn't include that in the slide I'm sorry. That's that was my feel kind of give you a sense of scale of ultimate tulle compared to our home Our local zone This is what the ultimate tulle looks like by comparison to Um, uh bought the structures that we see on on the on pluto Kind of gives you a sense of also even though we were four times as close Uh, we're still looking at a basically It says here my internet connection was unstable Uh, because nasa said that it was too risky to fly closer than what we actually did Uh, this is a picture of the back side as the ball Across the sky Which is kind of cool. This is important because we use this coupled with the the radio information To extract temperatures, uh with the body temperature the body is like Okay, next page. Um, here is a quick model view Of the what we think the body looks like and it's and you Had today's more spherical ultima is a more flattened ball I think we're going through a little bit of an unstable point here Okay, you might want to move on to the next slide because it could be that video that's causing it Hope we didn't lose them all together And this happens to me. I discovered that I've been Talking and without realizing no one was hearing Uh, it looks like we lost him. Um, I'm sure well he may come back Yeah, you know, he might have uh bumped out and he might come back in We can get all the way to the edges of our solar system Well, but we can't talk to each other across the country Well, there are a hundred and some of us on here tonight, so there are It's also been an exciting time just in the general east bay area with like connectivity and electricity There's a binary fire of the street, so oh, that's right But um, hopefully back in a second Um, I actually had a since he brought up the expanse I was actually wondering about the like how tight I heard the how tightly packed uh Ultimate uh, tula is like is it rubble? Correct. It seems like it's more of a rubble pile So say if you're on the expanse university like to spin up their asteroids to generate artificial gravity And it would just like uh fly apart, but uh I can't ask him right now Well, we're almost at the top of the hour again anyway Got about four minutes left Yeah, um, we had a question about getting the slides from the presentation and orcun said that he was uh Willing to share the slides so when we get those We will definitely put them on the resource page as well So that'll probably be the next several days Hey I'm back Yay, I'm sorry, and I think I've run out of time. Haven't I? Well, we're pretty much, uh, you know if you want to take a couple minutes to kind of wrap up here I think yeah, I can show you three slides to kind of wrap things up perfect And uh, here, let's uh share Uh-oh, there it is. Okay, let's share this page Okay all right, so Thank you for uh, I just wanted to just to point out what Beautiful about this. This was those measurements I was telling you the ground campaign measurements and we knew that it looked like this When we take the actual object and we put it and this is the actual object Wet of actual objects based on the images and it fit perfectly on what those ground uh trans Ground campaign measurements had predicted to be Which is beautiful because when we finally figured that out Like oh my god, we're we're not out of our minds and the the the folks that were involved with that are the fella here you see on the right that's mark bewey and Simon porter helped him very much in this sort of thing and it was In the effort so it was pretty cool. And then so there's mark bewey I just think it's so amazing that he did this and then john It's spent so is the mission He designed the mission So they worked closely together to make uh to to to make sure that this thing worked So it was kind of cool. Like wow it totally worked out. All right, so a couple quick things. Um, We don't really understand the geology. Uh, there's a lot of cool things that we think we see On the right is a geologic map of the surface, but that's just what it is It's a map based on textural analysis, but we don't know what anything is really made of We have a lot of ideas and I will make these slides available for people if they want them We have certain notions that locations up here may be examples of what's called scarpa tree having to do with the sublimation of certain relatively volatile species over time in the solar system or may happen early on as well. We don't know Uh, this is a cool one. I really wanted to show you this I if I had a full hour, I would do it if I wasn't talking so much But that's just cool This shows you what the geopotentials look like the arrows show you where if you were to place a ball on the surface In what direction they would float We also discovered that the two lobes are very aligned with each other So they're spinning axes. They're dominant spinning axes are aligned with one another How did that happen? We got really quite sure We have some confirmation. I'll skip over this I wanted to show you this is a spectrum and what the spectrum shows is a predominant Oh, I think we lost you again Well, we did have a question about what the uh url for the outreach resource page is Um, and I think dave was gonna pull that up and post it. Generally if you were able to find the Uh link for pre-registering for this it should be on the same page And that's where we'll be posting the video as well as posting the slides so I think that You know, there's a a lot of really uh, interesting Questions and and I think that uh, there are a lot of questions about the dynamics of the collision between the two bodies That I would have found quite interesting But I think we're gonna have to say that for another time so I think that um I'm going to go ahead and uh Stop the recording down. So thank you. Have a good stick stick around. We'll be right back here