Key facts
- Category
- Asteroids
- Object class
- Kuiper belt contact binary
- Composition
- Water ice and tholin-rich organics
- Scale fact
- 34.5 kmmaximum extent
- Mass
- ~750 billion metric tons
486958 Arrokoth
34.5 kmmaximum extent
Explore 486958 Arrokoth to scaleVisual creditNew Horizons 2019 / NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / SwRI / Roman Tkachenko / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Details
Arrokoth is a cold classical Kuiper belt object and the most distant world ever explored up close. New Horizons flew past it in 2019 and found a contact binary of two lobes gently joined together.
New Horizons flew past Arrokoth on 1 January 2019, making it the most distant object yet explored at close range. Its images resolved a reddish contact binary about 34.5 kilometers long, composed of two flattened lobes now named Wenu and Weeyo.
The lobes' shapes and alignment are consistent with a low-speed merger after both formed in the same local cloud of material. Arrokoth therefore supports models in which planetesimals in this part of the Kuiper belt grew by gentle accretion.
Links
- Preset views
- Wikipedia
- 486958 Arrokoth on Wikipedia
Size neighbors
Objects near 486958 Arrokoth on the scale
Shared physical scale
92.5km
Sources
References for 486958 Arrokoth
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- 486958 Arrokoth — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (New Horizons 2019 / NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / SwRI / Roman Tkachenko, Public domain)
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About
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