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Asteroid · evidence and sources

Arrokoth

A primordial contact binary in the Kuiper belt visited by New Horizons in 2019.

Also known as 486958, 486958 Arrokoth, 2014 MU69.

Kepler elements Orbit basis, the same label the app shows on the selection card.

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Every aspect, with its origin

One record per aspect. The origin says what kind of thing each value is; the source says where it came from; the limit says what it cannot tell you.

ObservedCatalogComputedReconstructedIllustrativeUndocumented
Orbit Computed

Orbit from osculating elements

Arrokoth is placed by solving a Keplerian orbit around sun at the simulation time (a = 44.1 AU, e = 0.03555717645015258, i = 2.5°, period 106,796.1 d).

SourceNASA PDS / New Horizons
EpochJD 2461200.5
MethodTwo-body propagation of the stored elements by the shared orbit service; no perturbations.
LimitA two-body orbit ignores planetary perturbations and non-gravitational forces; the dated JPL snapshot in the app's live catalog supersedes these bundled elements.
Identity Catalog

Arrokoth source record

Arrokoth is presented using mission-derived shape; approximate reflectance and orientation data.

SourceNASA PDS / New Horizons
Retrieved
Physical data Catalog

Bulk properties

Arrokoth: mean radius 18 km. These values are bundled with the object record and drive the rendered size.

SourceNASA PDS / New Horizons
Retrieved
Appearance Illustrative

Close-up appearance

The surface is a procedural shape unless a source record above says otherwise. It is not a measured shape model.

SourceSpace Time rendering contract
LimitNot a resolved observation.
Appearance Reconstructed

The New Horizons flyby

The navigable silhouette uses the Porter 2024 mission shape model. Uniform reddish reflectance is illustrative; this reference image is not a global surface map.

SourceNASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI/Roman Tkachenko
MethodCompare the encounter photograph with the modeled object. This photograph is not a global surface map or a measurement of every modeled detail.
LimitThe navigable silhouette uses the Porter 2024 mission shape model. Uniform reddish reflectance is illustrative; this reference image is not a global surface map.
Description Undocumented

Description and facts

The short description and the fact list are written by the Space Time authors for orientation. They are not quoted from a catalog field and carry no citation of their own.

SourceSpace Time editorial text

What is not measured

  • Appearance: a picture, not a measurement. Close-up appearance. Not a resolved observation.
  • Appearance: a reconstruction from measurements, not a direct observation. The New Horizons flyby. The navigable silhouette uses the Porter 2024 mission shape model. Uniform reddish reflectance is illustrative; this reference image is not a global surface map.

Not yet documented

  • Description: The short description and the fact list are written by the Space Time authors for orientation. They are not quoted from a catalog field and carry no citation of their own.

Dataset freshness

Snapshots this page depends on, read from the generated manifests at request time.
DatasetLast refreshedHorizonAutomated
Current comets and near-Earth asteroids
JPL Small-Body Database
 no snapshot date Osculating elements at the snapshot epoch; propagated as two-body conics Yes, weekly (Monday data job)
npm run fetch:data

Sources cited

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