I could never get far enough in Paperboy where you got a chance to bean a burglar breaking into a home with a thrown paper. The dogs were often the bane of my existence.
New pics! These false-color images of two Kuiper Belt objects, 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85 (right), helped give New Horizons’ LORRI instrument the title of farthest-out working camera. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Photo)
I often find it hard to believe that I grew up looking at books with Pluto depicted as only tiny fuzzy images or as artists ideas.
Scientists think that they've finally figured out how those weird ice structures on Pluto were made. Cool pics at the link. New Horizons has its encounter with Ultima Thule at the end of the month.
For some reason I associate Ultima Thule with a princess in an Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp SF novel. I'm wrong, but it still lingers...
You thinking of Thuvia? Either way, this is going to be a huge moment for science, getting a look at a Kuiper belt object up close.
I'm surprised and impressed that we can spot something twenty miles across at the distance of six light hours.
New Horizons sent back the first pic of Ultima Thule. This composite image of Ultima Thule was taken just 33 hours before the December 2 course-correction maneuver that fine-tuned New Horizons’ trajectory for its New Year’s flyby. At left is the full LORRI image with a yellow circle centered on the location of Ultima Thule. Unlike the LORRI images taken in August through October 2018, the object is now evident among the many background stars even without further processing. Nevertheless, Ultima Thule really stands out after subtracting the background stars; the region within the yellow box has been expanded in the star-subtracted version of the image on the right. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
Thankfully, we'll still get data from New Horizons, even if the government is shutdown when it flys by Ultima Thule. Which is good, because it looks like Ultima Thule is weird.
New Horizons has sent its first pic back of the flyby and Ultima Thule looks like a peanut: https://www.theverge.com/platform/a...lyby-ultima-thule-signal-confirmation-success
Better pic of the giant space peanut has been released. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html
It's pretty impressive, getting the New Horizons craft to Ultima Thule would be like getting a sand grain to a ping pong ball from New York to London, within 10-12 feet.
This is mindblowing, we won't hear anything from New Horizons for a while, because it's on the opposite side of the sun from us. When this happens to the Mars rovers, it takes months before they're in position again to start sending data, for New Horizons, it'll be five days. Video at the link. BTW, Ultima Thule is as red as Mars.
It's also an ancient name for Iceland. Who knew? NASA just released a video of the flyby. (Personally, I would have gone with "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" for the music.)
