The Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth was the target of the January 1, 2019 flyby by NASA’s New Horizons mission.
Three prominent features on Arrokoth now have official names. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
Arrokoth, which means ‘sky’ in the Powhatan/Algonquin Native American language, was discovered in 2014 by the New Horizons team using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Also known as Ultima Thule or 2014 MU69, it orbits the Sun once every 298 years at an average distance of 44.6 AU (astronomical units).
The farthest object ever explored by spacecraft, Arrokoth is a contact binary about 36 km (22 miles) long, composed of two planetesimals about 21 km (13 miles) and 15 km (9 miles) across.
In January 2019, New Horizons yielded a range of images and data that are helping planetary scientists understand how objects like Arrokoth — the building blocks of the planets — form.
Some of the scientific analyses on the data focused on three key features: a nearly circular arc on Arrokoth’s larger lobe, a bright ‘neck’ connecting the lobes, and a large crater on the smaller lobe.
The New Horizons team named the arc ‘Ka’an,’ the word for sky in the Yucatec Mayan language spoken in parts of the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula and Belize.
It also resembles the word for ‘snake’ in this language — ‘kan’ — and both terms derive from the classical Mayan word, ‘chan.’
“Mayan paintings often show a snake arching over the scene, representing the sky or heaven,” said New Horizons co-investigator Dr. Mark Showalter, a researcher with the SETI Institute.
“So we thought it was particularly appropriate to use ‘Ka’an’ for this prominent, arc-shaped feature on Arrokoth.”
The most reflective area on Arrokoth, the neck is named ‘Akasa,’ the word for ‘sky’ in Bengali (Bangla), and derived from similar words in Sanskrit (ākāśam), Nepali (akās), Malayalam (ākāśaṃ), Oriya (akaśô), Sinhalese (ākāśaya), Tamil (ākāyam) and Telugu (ākāśamu).
The large crater, streaked with bright areas across its 7-km- (4-mile) wide floor, is officially named ‘Sky,’ in English.
The team had nicknamed the crater ‘Maryland’ soon after the flyby, in tribute to the location of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft.
“Naming these features on Arrokoth is a milestone that the New Horizons team is very proud to reach,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr. Alan Stern, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute.
“It’s a significant step in our discovery and exploration of this ancient object, in a distant region of the Solar System we’re just beginning to learn about.”
