Related Topic in KAS Prelims Syllabus:
Science and Technology [Paper-II]: Technology in Space
News
- Ultima Thule, the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft, has been renamed Arrokoth, or “sky” in the Native American Powhatan language.
- It was renamed, following a backlash over the previous name’s Nazi connotations.
- NASA’s New Horizons team proposed the name to the International Astronomical Union and Minor Planets Center, the international authority for naming Kuiper Belt objects.
Earlier Names
- It was provisionally named 2014 MU69 based on the year of its discovery.
- It was given the nickname ‘Ultima Thule’ in 2018, following public suggestions made to NASA.
Why the name was changed?
- “Ultima Thule” was the subject of controversy.
- It references a mythical distant land, but the term had also been used by a precursor to the Nazi party.
- The new name avoids those negative connotations.
About Arrokoth
- It is a trans-Neptunian object located in the Kuiper belt.
- It was discovered in 2014 by a New Horizons team using the powerful Hubble Space Telescope.
- It was surveyed by the NASA spaceship New Horizons in January, 2019.
- According to the survey, it consisted of two spheres stuck together in the shape of a snowman.
- It belongs to a class of Kuiper belt objects called the “cold classicals”, which have nearly circular orbits with low inclinations to the solar plane.
