On New Year's Day the spacecraft New Horizons flew by Ultima Thule, a rock about 30 km in size way beyond Pluto. Images are on their way. In this first episode of Space Cowboys we ask astronomer Rudolf le Poole (and ourselves) what we already know about Ultima Thule, what we can expect of the data News Horizons gathered in the mere hours that the flyby lasted and what's next for this incredible mission (spoiler: it may last for another 20 years).

Also we discuss related missions such as Voyager 2 (left the heliosphere in November), OSIRIS-REx (entered an robit around asteroid Bennu at a height of just 1,75 km, also on New Year's Day) and Hayabusa 2 from Japan, which dropped robotic rovers on Ryugu, another asteroid.

Space Cowboys is a weekly podcast on space, rocket science, the hunt for life, telecommunications and maybe even some espionage. Space Cowboys is brought to you in English from Amsterdam by science and technology journalists Herbert Blankesteijn and Tyse Roes.

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==VIDEO VERSION== ==SHOW NOTES==

Ultima Thule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69

New Horizons basic information

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NewHorizonsPressKit__UT.pdf

News link: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/index.php

Voyager 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2

Golden Record on cd: https://ozmarecords.com/collections/shop/products/voyager-golden-record-book-2xcd

OSIRIS-REx news

https://www.asteroidmission.org/latest-news/

Hayabusa-2

https://www.asteroidmission.org/latest-news/

https://www.space.com/40161-hayabusa2.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06928-7

Brian May's song about New Horizons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Jm5POCAj8

==CREDITS==

Space Cowboys is made by Tyse Roes (http://thijsroes.nl/) and Herbert Blankesteijn ( http://blankesteijn.com/) in collaboration with BNR News Radio in Amsterdam.

Our specialist on Asian spaceflight is Joeri Nortier (https://nl.linkedin.com/in/joerinortier).

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.