New Horizons

ads20101 · 02-01-2019 8:00pm

NASA tv now folks

refusetolose · 02-01-2019 8:06pm

ads20101 · 02-01-2019 8:06pm

It’s a snowman

ads20101 · 02-01-2019 8:16pm

ads20101 · 02-01-2019 8:17pm

Look at the pp slides (bottom left)

They have the date wrong

January 2 2018

Curly Judge · 02-01-2019 8:45pm

Ultima Thule is a contact binary.
Watch it here: https://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html?utm_source=notification
The smaller head is to be called Thule and the 3 times larger body is to be called Ultima.

Capt'n Midnight · 02-01-2019 11:13pm

Now in colour. Reddish like Pluto.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2236/first-color-image-of-ultima-thule/

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/resources/detail_files/2236_MU69_color.png

The first color image of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers) at 4:08 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, highlights its reddish surface. At left is an enhanced color image taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), produced by combining the near infrared, red and blue channels. The center image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has a higher spatial resolution than MVIC by approximately a factor of five. At right, the color has been overlaid onto the LORRI image to show the color uniformity of the Ultima and Thule lobes. Note the reduced red coloring at the neck of the object.

feargale · 03-01-2019 2:16am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Now in colour. Reddish like Pluto.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2236/first-color-image-of-ultima-thule/

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/resources/detail_files/2236_MU69_color.png

In colour it's very obvious now that it's not a snowman as we were first told. It's a malformed potato.

Capt'n Midnight · 03-01-2019 9:52pm

It's behind the Sun for a while

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190103

Data transmission from New Horizons will pause for about a week while the spacecraft passes behind the sun as seen from here on Earth. Data transmission resumes Jan. 10, starting a 20-month download of the spacecraft's remaining scientific treasures.

JupiterKid · 06-01-2019 12:35am

It’ll take 2 years for all the data to be downloaded.

Meanwhile, China has successfully landed the first rover on the far side of the Moon. Yay!

MadYaker · 06-01-2019 4:19am

And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look the same as this side!

Seriously though why did they bother with that? This is much cooler. Cool to see a thread on boards following the whole thing as well.

mikhail · 06-01-2019 4:26pm

MadYaker wrote: »

Seriously though why did they bother with that?

China has done a lot of me-too space exploration. This is unusual for them in that it's a first. There's some degree of technical challenge in successfully landing something in the radio shadow of the moon. They've built and launched a relay satellite to make that work. There are some minor experiments they can perform at that location, but the main thing is the statement of intent that they're ready for bigger challenges. I expect them to do something pretty cool in that direction the next decade.

Wibbs · 06-01-2019 9:45pm

Hopefully. Though on the manned front getting to low earth orbit is "easy", going from earth to the moon is of a magnitude more difficult. They're gonna need a bigger boat rocket for a start. A real heavy lifter. I suppose they could go one of the original notions planned for Apollo, which is get a space station together as a launch platform, but that needs a heavy lifter or a shedload of lower weight launches. The final Apollo setup is probably still about the "easiest", but it has a built in obsolescence too.

Hotblack Desiato · 07-01-2019 3:02am

A big smack upside the head for anyone who says "dark side of the moon". :rolleyes:

mikhail · 07-01-2019 3:28pm

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

A big smack upside the head for anyone who says "dark side of the moon". :rolleyes:

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.

SophieLockhart · 08-01-2019 12:12am

Dark doesn't have to mean no light though, it could just mean unexplored or not as familiar.

Zubeneschamali · 08-01-2019 9:40am

SophieLockhart wrote: »

Dark doesn't have to mean no light though, it could just mean unexplored or not as familiar.

"Darkest Africa".

JupiterKid · 09-01-2019 2:09am

New Horizons mission director Alan Stern has stated that with any luck the spacecraft may make a close encounter with another Kuiper Belt Object as it exits our solar system.

Remember the Kuiper belt, a vast belt of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (and which Pluto is one of the larger members of) was only directly detected for the first time in 1992, and makes the much closer asteroid belt seem tiny in comparison.

It is also the reservoir fron which short period comets originate from. Essentially the just imaged Ultima Thule is the naked nucleus of a comet. Amazing!

As for China landing a rover on the far side of the Moon, yes this is a feat. Yes, the Americans walked on the Moon nearly 50 years ago, but China have firm plans for manned lunar missions, and these will be incremental in nature, leading to a manned lunar base in the long term. Not a “footprints and flags” space-race driven Apollo programme that turned out to be a dead end.

ThunderCat · 09-01-2019 11:51am

SophieLockhart wrote: »

Dark doesn't have to mean no light though, it could just mean unexplored or not as familiar.

In the case of the Moon it also means radio silence. To overcome this I'm pretty sure the Chinese have some sort of relay probe in moon orbit which allows communication with the rover.

ads20101 · 10-01-2019 3:20pm

Just had a look on the New Horizons site:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/

Rather surprised that no further imagery has been released since the 1/1/19

RebelButtMunch · 10-01-2019 3:32pm

ads20101 wrote: »

Just had a look on the New Horizons site:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/

Rather surprised that no further imagery has been released since the 1/1/19

I thought I'd read that it's gone behind the sun for a bit and will resume after that.

ads20101 · 10-01-2019 3:51pm

I went onto the DSN to see if they're getting data at the moment. Unfortunately, not from New Horizons, but I did see that they are currently receiving data from voyager 1 at a distance of 21.7 billion km.

Amazing stuff!!

mikhail · 10-01-2019 3:54pm

RebelButtMunch wrote: »

I thought I'd read that it's gone behind the sun for a bit and will resume after that.

That's correct. We're in a ten-day window where they can't communicate with the probe. Normal service should resume fairly soon.

AMKC · 12-01-2019 6:29pm

mikhail wrote: »

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.

Its called the dark side of the moon because it never faces the Earth and we never get to see that 40% of it from the Earth because of the Earths orbit and how the moon goes around the Earth. We can see the other 60% of the moon from the Earth but not all at the one time.

mikhail · 12-01-2019 7:04pm

AMKC wrote: »

Its called the dark side of the moon because it never faces the Earth and we never get to see that 40% of it from the Earth because of the Earths orbit and how the moon goes around the Earth. We can see the other 60% of the moon from the Earth but not all at the one time.

It's a Pink Floyd lyric, doofus. People posting on this board generally know the moon is tidally locked.

Hotblack Desiato · 14-01-2019 2:40am

Hilarious reading the excuses on here about how a side of the moon which is sunlit 50% of the time is actually "dark". :rolleyes:

mikhail · 28-01-2019 4:25pm

They released a nice image from a more oblique angle the other day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/ultima-thule-photo.html

26tb-newhorizons-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

26tb-newhorizons-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

mikhail · 11-02-2019 7:21pm

More data alters presumed shape of Ultima Thule:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/it-looks-like-ultima-thule-may-be-more-of-a-pancake-than-snowman/

mikhail · 20-09-2019 2:29pm

“Celestial snowman” starts to reveal its secrets

At first glance, MU69 looked much as researchers had imagined a pristine Kuiper Belt object (KBO) would appear, with a dark surface, rich in water ice and organic material, and relatively unscarred by craters. But when they looked closer, it offered plenty of surprises. From its shape to its spin to its composition, the distant rock is providing planetary researchers with a wealth of information about the conditions in the vicinity of the sun 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s even helping solve a decades-old puzzle about how the planets formed.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/38/18749

Capt'n Midnight · 13-06-2020 11:34pm

New Horizons conducts the first interstellar parallax experiment

This two-frame animation of Wolf 359 blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth images of each star, clearly illustrating the different view of the sky New Horizons has from its deep-space perch. Credit: NASA
...

The New Horizons experiment provides the largest parallax baseline ever made—over 4 billion miles

New Horizons

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