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2019_EJRNL_PP_ALEXANDRA_WITZE_1.pdf
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It’s a snowman! Some of the first images from NASA’s fly-by of the most distant world ever visited by humanity — space rock 2014 MU69 — reveal that it has two asymmetrical lobes. The space agency’s New Horizons spacecraft captured the close-ups of MU69 on 1 January, before it whizzed just 3,500 kilometres above the object’s surface. The rock is a ‘contact binary’, formed by the gentle merger of two objects. “It’s really, really cool,”