486958 Arrokoth

486958 Arrokoth,^[a] provisional designation 2014 MU₆₉, is a trans-Neptunian object located in the Kuiper belt. It is a contact binary 36 km (22 mi) long, made of two planetesimals 21 km (13 mi) and 15 km (9 mi) across, nicknamed "Ultima" and "Thule". The New Horizons team use this classical pronunciation, the pseudo-Latin pronunciation /ˈtuːleɪ/ TOO-lay, and the hybrid pronunciation /ˈtuːliː/ TOO-lee.^[1]^[2] The surface is made of pale red tholins, formed due to the surface being exposed to UV light.^[3]

486958 Arrokoth Media

Pamunkey tribal elder Reverend Nick Miles commencing the naming ceremony for Arrokoth
Shape model of Arrokoth, colored to show variations in geopotential elevation across its surface
The geology of Arrokoth, with comet 67P to scale. Weeyo is depicted in cool colors (blues and greens) and Wenu in warm (yellows and reds). The labels 'bm', 'dm', 'pm', 'rm' and 'um' indicate bright, dark, patterned (mottled), rough and undifferentiated material, respectively. The eight rolling topographic units 'ma' to 'mh' may be the ancestral building blocks of Wenu.
Illustration depicting the hypothesized formation sequence of Arrokoth.
Discovery images of Arrokoth, cropped from five Wide Field Camera 3 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on 26 June 2014.
Path of Arrokoth's shadow on Earth during its 4 August 2018 occultation of an unnamed star in Sagittarius. This event was successfully observed from locations in Senegal and Colombia.
Arrokoth among the stars of Sagittarius—with and without background star omission (apparent magnitude 20 to 15; late 2018).
Movie of New Horizons's approach to Arrokoth, constructed from images taken by the spacecraft during its flyby on 1 January 2019
View of Arrokoth by New Horizons after closest approach. The silhouette of Arrokoth's shape can be seen among the background stars.