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It’s an exciting new year in space exploration and today we are getting back images from the most distant object ever explored by a probe spacecraft. Launched in January of 2006, NASA’s amazing New Horizons mission (pictured above) has been flying through the solar system ever since. Back in 2014 it reached its primary objective, the icy dwarf world Pluto, which has been the focus of considerable interest and, arguably, of even greater controversy concerning astronomical naming conventions (“My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us….Nothing.” could arguably teach us about astronomy AND independent food preparation, I suppose). Since that time, New Horizons has continued to fly further from the Sun and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a dark distant band of icy pseudo-worlds at the edge of the Solar System. New Horizons just flew past one of these Kuiper Belt objects…the distant ice ball 2014 MU69.
This frozen miniature planet is only 35 by 15 km (20 by 10 miles in diameter) and it orbits the sun every 298 years. The most exciting part of this body is its shape. It is literally a snowman—a smaller spherical lump of ice frozen to a larger one. Just look at it! You can practically see Charlie Brown half-building it and then giving up with a silent outer space “Good Grief”
Sadly, the mission has generated another astronomical naming controversy. Scientists were dissatisfied with the way “2014 MU69” rolled off the tongue so they crowdsourced the problem to the internet to find names for this distant iceball. The internet suggested “Ultima Thule” which was a Roman and Medieval term for the unknown icy lands beyond the periphery of the known world. That is a pretty good name and the scientists split it into two for the weird binary snowman (the larger body is “Ultima” and the smaller is “Thule”). Unfortunately, though, Nazi occultists also found the name “Thule” back in the thirties and they used it as a mythical place of origin for the mythical Aryan Race (sorry Nazis, we are all originally African).
Like all good-hearted people, I despise Nazis…but this seems like a Roman name sullied by racist morons more than a millennium after its introduction. Do you think scientists need to rename this primitive snowman world? Or should we go with Ultima Thule? Or should we just stick with 2014 MU69 (since, frankly, unless New Horizons discovers some strange artifacts, alien beings, or something we are probably never going to think about this corner of the solar system again).
ferrebeekeeper 