From Cosmos to Canvas: New Horizons and Ultima Thule

In July 2015, after nine and a half years and 4.67 billion miles of interplanetary travel, stunning images of Pluto began pouring back from NASA’s New Horizons space probe. There’s a marvelous section in our film, Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future where fellow space artist David Aguilar compares Chesley’s paintings of Pluto, made in 1949 and 1960, with the photos that came back from New Horizons. Chesley did not have anything but a small dot on a black and white photo taken in 1930 as a reference. Pretty amazing!

The New Horizons mission was an unqualified success, but it left engineers and scientists pondering the question “What’s next?” The New Horizons spacecraft was in perfect condition, had plenty of nuclear fuel on board and was clipping through space at a speed of 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph). Since the spacecraft was now headed deep into the Kuiper Belt, where left-over rubble from the creation of our planets is strewn about, project scientists zeroed in on an object known as MU69.

Using images from Hubble and other telescopes, it was determined that MU69 was not round, but rather something that appeared to be shaped more like a peanut…or perhaps it might be two objects very close together. New Horizons would sort that out during its flyby. In the meantime, MU69 needed a catchier name and after polling the public, MU69 became “Ultima Thule,” (Too-lay) an ancient term referring to territory beyond our known world.

As a space artist, I was intrigued with the possibilities of what Ultima Thule would look like. This challenge really connected me with what Chesley must have felt when he pondered how to make visible what was pretty much invisible. Initially, I painted a version where it might be two objects orbiting one another, a binary object:

And then I created a version where they are joined together, a contact binary:

As 2018 came to a close, New Horizons was now over 1 billion miles past Pluto and a rendezvous with Ultima Thule was imminent. I was really excited to see what Ultima would reveal herself to be.

On New Year’s Day, 2019, this image came back:

And wouldn’t you know it…. guess who was born on New Years Day back in 1888? Chesley Bonestell himself!

The next day, NASA released this image, which showed Ultima Thule up close and personal:

Now that we were embarking on a mission to explore Pluto, the stamp was affixed to the back of the New Horizons space probe at its birthplace at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

It now holds the record for traveling the furthest of any stamp ever issued by the US Postal Service.

My Pluto stamp might be the Post Office's first unofficial "Forever Stamp" considering how long it could be traveling. Otherwise, New Horizons may end up back at NASA someday with an alien post mark that says "Insufficient Postage."

- RM