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00:00...room, in our geology and geophysics room, just as one of the first images came to the ground from that flyby.
00:09And you can see how happy people are. I don't think we've stressed enough, and so I really...
00:20Now let's get to the science.
00:21We could not be happier. What you're seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by spacecraft.
00:28Two completely separate objects that are now joined together, and you're going to hear a lot more about that.
00:34But let me say, that bowling pin is gone. It's a snowman, if it's anything at all.
00:41And, you know, we have to start thinking about some provisional names,
00:46and particularly we need names right up front for the two lobes, so that we can refer to them individually.
00:52Now being scientists, we're not all that creative with words, so what we've decided to do is name one lobe Ultima and the other Thule.
01:02The big one is obviously Ultima. It's pretty easy to remember.
01:08And I want to talk about one more thing before I turn it over to Kathy.
01:11You remember that in the summer...
01:19I think we can get this out now.
01:21Yeah.
01:24So this is our model of our bilobate comet, and I'm going to tell you about the rotation period of Ultima.
01:32The rotation of Ultima, the bilobed object there, compared to an ellipse.
01:39Brightness variations depending on how bright the surface is.
01:43So the brightest areas reflect 13% of the incident sunlight.
01:48But it also is notably less red.
01:51We have other data sets which will be downloaded over the course of the next two years,
01:57and those are going to tell us a little bit more about the smaller scale variations of Ultima Thule.
02:03The most primitive object that has yet been seen by any spacecraft, and may represent a class of objects,
02:10which are the oldest and is basically the first planetesimals.
02:16And from these first planetesimals, where they're more commonly found,
02:21or where they were more commonly found in the inner solar system,
02:25came together to form the planets and the moons and everything else we see.
02:28But these are what's the only remaining basic building blocks in the backyard of the solar system.
02:35We can see that everything else that we live on or see through our telescopes or visit with our spacecraft were formed from.
02:45The better of the ones that you saw, the one in Jeff's presentation,
02:49was taken from a range of I think about 50,000 kilometers, maybe a little bit closer.
02:55And so it was still something like an hour before closest approach.
02:59We can get you those numbers.
03:02We'll make a statement and then we'll open it to Dr. Stern.
03:05What we think we're looking at is the end product of a process which probably took place in only a few hundred thousand or maybe a few million years,
03:13at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system,
03:15where initially you have innumerable planets,
03:20and then you have a process that takes place in a very small number of years.