Message From Pluto

Dayton Kitchens · Aug 7, 2017

Dinner said: ↑

Christopher said: ↑

Dayton3 said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Seriously though, as long as you have Zelda, your GameBoy's set
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I'm more partial to the TNG game, the TOS game, and Paper Boy.
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Paper Boy?!

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I used to play that on C64. Oh, and spy hunter as well.
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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.

Tuckerfan · Feb 9, 2018

New pics!

3.8 billion miles! New Horizons spacecraft sends pictures from farthest vantage point

Two and a half years after becoming the first probe to study Pluto up close, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is gaining more fame for possessing the solar system’s farthest-out camera in operation.

Today NASA released a set of images captured by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on Dec. 5 of last year, when the piano-sized probe was 3.79 billion miles from Earth.

One of LORRI’s pictures shows the “Wishing Well” star cluster, a scattering of points of light that New Horizons could use for camera calibration purposes.

Two hours later, LORRI looked at two objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects that New Horizons has been traveling through in the wake of its Pluto encounter. The “Wishing Well” view and those two false-color images, showing the objects known as 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85, are what gave LORRI its record as the farthest-out camera.

“New Horizons has long been a mission of firsts — first to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt, fastest spacecraft ever launched. And now we’ve been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history,” mission principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said today in a news release.

The record was previously held by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which snapped the image data for the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image on Feb. 14, 1990. That picture, the brainchild of the late physicist Carl Sagan, looked back at Earth from a distance of 3.75 billion miles.

Voyager’s cameras were turned off shortly afterward and are no longer being used, even though the probe continues to zoom through the solar system’s fringe at a distance of 13.2 billion miles.

New Horizons, in contrast, is just getting started. Or restarted. The probe is periodically in communication with the mission team as it closes in on its next target, a Kuiper Belt object (or perhaps even two paired objects) known as 2014 MU69. A Pluto-style flyby is scheduled for Jan. 1, 2019.

By that time, 2014 MU69 is almost certain to have a nickname, thanks in part to a naming contest that’s currently in the deliberation phase. For what it’s worth, the most popular choice was Mjölnir, which pays tribute to the hammer wielded by Thor, the Norse god (and Marvel movie star).

It remains to be seen whether Mjölnir passes muster with NASA and the International Astronomical Union. In the meantime, we’ll always have 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.
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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)

Tuckerfan · Mar 13, 2018

Nick name for New Horizons next target.

New Horizons Chooses Nickname for ‘Ultimate’ Flyby Target

As NASA’s New Horizons mission continues exploring the unknown, the mission team has selected a highly appropriate nickname for its next flyby target in the outer reaches of the solar system.

With substantial public input, the team has chosen “Ultima Thule” (pronounced ultima thoo-lee”) for the Kuiper Belt object the New Horizons spacecraft will explore on Jan. 1, 2019. Officially known as 2014 MU69, the object, which orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto, will be the most primitive world ever observed by spacecraft – in the farthest planetary encounter in history.

Thule was a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography. Ultima Thule means "beyond Thule"– beyond the borders of the known world—symbolizing the exploration of the distant Kuiper Belt and Kuiper Belt objects that New Horizons is performing, something never before done.

“MU69 is humanity's next Ultima Thule,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Our spacecraft is heading beyond the limits of the known worlds, to what will be this mission’s next achievement. Since this will be the farthest exploration of any object in space in history, I like to call our flyby target Ultima, for short, symbolizing this ultimate exploration by NASA and our team.”

Looking for a more inspirational albeit temporary moniker than the designator 2014 MU69, NASA and the New Horizons team launched the nickname campaign in early November. Hosted by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, and led by Mark Showalter, an institute fellow and member of the New Horizons science team, the online contest (http://frontierworlds.seti.org/) sought nominations from the public and stipulated that a nickname would be chosen from among the top vote-getters.

The popular campaign wrapped up on Dec. 6, after a five-day extension to accommodate more voting. The campaign involved 115,000 participants from around the world, who nominated some 34,000 names. Of those, 37 names reached the ballot for voting and were evaluated for popularity – this included eight names suggested by the New Horizons team and 29 nominated by the public.

The team then narrowed its selection to the 29 publicly nominated names and gave preference to names near the top of the polls. Ultima Thule was nominated by about 40 members of the public and one of the highest vote-getters among all name nominees. “We are grateful to those who proposed such an interesting and inspirational nickname,” Showalter said. “They deserve credit for capturing the true spirit of exploration that New Horizons embodies.”

The name was suggested to think of MU69 as a distant follow up to Pluto, which New Horizons historically and famously encountered in July 2015. Other names considered included Abeona, Pharos, Pangu, Rubicon, Olympus, Pinnacle and Tiramisu. The final tallies are posted at http://frontierworlds.seti.org/.

After the flyby, NASA and the New Horizons team will choose a formal name to submit to the International Astronomical Union, based in part on whether MU69 is found to be a single body, a binary pair, or perhaps a system of multiple objects.
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Tuckerfan · Jun 8, 2018

"Good morning, Dr. Chandra. I'm ready for my first lesson."

New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes Up to Prepare for Historic Flyby of Distant Object

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has woken up from hibernation to prepare for a historic New Year's Day flyby at the edge of our solar system.

The New Horizons probe, which flew by Pluto in July 2015, has been in hibernation mode since Dec. 21 to preserve resources. But, on June 5, the mission operations team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory received confirmation, through NASA's Deep Space Network, that the spacecraft had exited hibernation, as it was programmed to do.

The spacecraft will now begin preparations for a New Year's flyby encounter with the farthest planetary encounter in history. The spacecraft is currently traveling more than 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth through the icy band of debris surrounding the solar system beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, and it will spend the upcoming months preparing for its encounter with a small Kuiper Belt object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.

"Our team is already deep into planning and simulations of our upcoming flyby of Ultima Thule and excited that New Horizons is now back in an active state to ready the bird for flyby operations," the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

Over the first three days that New Horizons is awake, the mission team will send the first of many commands to the spacecraft's onboard computers. Next, the team will update the craft's memory, retrieve science data about the Kuiper Belt and complete a series of systems checks. These initial steps will last approximately two months, and flyby operations and distant observations of Ultima will begin in late August, according to the statement.

Ultima Thule, officially named 2014 MU69, is a world that orbits approximately a billion miles beyond Pluto. Ultima Thule was chosen as a nickname for this object, with public input, because it means "beyond Thule," or beyond the edge of the known world. The name signifies just how extraordinary this flyby will be, as it will be beyond anything humans have ever before accomplished.
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Tuckerfan · Jul 21, 2018

NASA releases new images of Pluto and Charon, showing exactly what colors they are.

Dayton Kitchens · Jul 28, 2018

Tuckerfan said: ↑

NASA releases new images of Pluto and Charon, showing exactly what colors they are.

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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.

Tuckerfan · Dec 3, 2018

Scientists think that they've finally figured out how those weird ice structures on Pluto were made.

Cool Theory Finally Explains Pluto’s Skyscraper-Sized Ice Shards

When NASA’s New Horizons space probe zipped past Pluto in 2015, it revealed portions of the dwarf planet’s surface were strewn with what could only be described as gigantic blades of ice, many of which extended into the Plutonian sky for hundreds of feet. Finally, after nearly two years of research, a team of scientists think they’ve figured out the nature of these odd features and how they came to appear on the surface.

New research published in Icarus proposes that the bladed terrain of Pluto is the product of a unique kind of erosion that slowly claws away at giant mounds of frozen methane. As Pluto’s climate changed over time, this erosion bit away at these structures, forging them into dramatic crests and sharp divides. The finding shows that Pluto’s surface and atmosphere is far more dynamic (and weirder) than we thought.

These jagged geological ridges—the highest of which reach an astounding 1,600 feet (500 meters)—are found at Pluto’s highest altitudes and near the equator. Jeffrey Moore, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, thought this was an interesting clue, leading him to theorize that the structures first formed on the surface as methane gas froze from the atmosphere. The process is similar to what’s seen on a frosty autumnal morning, but instead of water ice, Pluto features methane ice.

“When we realized that bladed terrain consists of tall deposits of methane ice, we asked ourselves why it forms all of these ridges, as opposed to just being big blobs of ice on the ground,” noted Moore in a statement. “It turns out that Pluto undergoes climate variation and sometimes, when Pluto is a little warmer, the methane ice begins to basically ‘evaporate’ away.”

But on Pluto, methane doesn’t turn into a liquid before it turns into a gas. Recalling your 10th grade chemistry, this process is known as sublimation, where a solid goes directly into a vapor under special circumstances.

Importantly, similar features can be found along Earth’s high altitude equatorial regions, though at a vastly smaller scale. Such terrestrial structures are known as penitentes—snow formations that measure just a few feet high, but with a striking resemblance to what’s observed on Pluto.

If Moore is right, this means that Pluto’s bladed terrain is the product of an active surface, one that’s evolving over long periods of time. Millions of years ago, Pluto’s early climatic conditions caused the methane to freeze at high elevations. As time passed, these conditions changed, and the methane structures began to burn off into a gas, creating the giant ice blades we see today.

Interestingly, this latest research is also telling us a bit more about Pluto’s topography. When New Horizons zoomed past Pluto at a distance of 7,750 miles (12,500 km) and at a speed of 32,500 miles per hour (52,300 km/h), the spacecraft only managed to capture low resolution images of its so-called “far side,” while feverishly searching for methane and other compounds on Pluto using its onboard infrared spectrometer.

Armed with the knowledge that methane likes to form at high elevation surfaces, Moore’s team has produced an updated topographical map of the minor planet. Excitingly, this added information suggests that the bladed terrain also exists on Pluto’s lesser known side. Time to plan another mission!
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Cool pics at the link.

New Horizons has its encounter with Ultima Thule at the end of the month.

12 years after launch, New Horizons probe zeroes in on mysterious Ultima Thule

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object.

The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify its next quarry, a billion miles farther out in the Kuiper Belt. Now it’s crunch time for New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and his team.

Again.

“This flyby is a lot harder than Pluto,” Stern said. “Ultima is tiny, and faint, much harder to navigate on. … Another difficulty, or challenge, really, is that we’re farther away, and that means communication times are longer. Bit rates are lower.”

Today the team beamed out commands to fine-tune New Horizons’ trajectory using the spacecraft’s navigational thrusters (which, by the way, were built at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s facility in Redmond, Wash.). It took more than six hours for the commands to reach the probe at the speed of light, at a rate of 1,000 bits per second.

By the time mission managers get confirmation that their commands have been executed (or not), New Horizons will have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles farther on its path (or off its path).

“It’s a one-shot, ‘get it right or go home’ deal, because there’s no U-turn to go back and have a re-do. … You have to plan every chess move with the spacecraft more carefully,” said Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

Dozens of scientists and engineers are due to converge on Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to get set for the flyby, which is scheduled to come closest to Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. ET Jan. 1 (9:33 p.m. PT Dec. 31).

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will pass by Ultima at a distance of 2,200 miles, or less than a third of the distance used for the Pluto flyby, But the mission team is on the watch for any mini-moons that would force a shift to a safer, more distant trajectory.

During a recent rehearsal, the team had to cope with a worst-case scenario in which New Horizons spotted 11 satellites in Ultima’s vicinity. “It was just flying into a hornet’s nest,” Stern recalled.

Neither Stern nor anyone else knows exactly what New Horizons will actually see.

“We don’t know what a primordial, ancient, perfectly preserved object like Ultima is, because no one’s ever been to something like this,” Stern explained. “It’s terra incognita. It is pure exploration. We’ll just see what it’s all about — if it’s got rings, if it’s got a swarm of satellites.”

The Hubble imagery suggests that Ultima Thule (also known as 2014 MU69) measures roughly 20 miles wide — and might consist of two or more mutually orbiting objects. The dearth of knowledge leaves plenty of room for surprises.

“Considering how much we knew about Pluto, and how much it astounded us, here we’re starting from complete scratch,” Stern said. “We barely know its size and its color. We can’t tell you anything about its composition or its atmosphere, or satellites, any of that. But we’re going to find out.”

To find out, the plutonium-powered New Horizons probe will employ the same suite of scientific instruments that worked so well to study Pluto and its moons more than three years earlier.

New Horizons’ long-range camera, known as LORRI, currently sees Ultima as a mere speck, but it should be able to make out its shape starting a few days before the flyby. During the closest phase of the encounter, LORRI could detect features as small as the boats floating on the lake in New York’s Central Park, Stern said.

New Horizons will make use of an ultraviolet imager called Alice and an infrared and visible-light imaging spectrometer called Ralph to characterize Ultima’s composition. A radio science experiment will take its temperature, and other instruments will analyze particles in Ultima’s cosmic neighborhood.

It’s likely to take months to send back all the data from the Ultima flyby, just as it did in the wake of 2015’s Pluto flyby. But eventually, Act Two of the New Horizons mission is expected to add to Act One’s already-substantial record of revelations about the icy worlds on the solar system’s edge.

Will there be an Act Three? Stern said he and his colleagues fully intend to ask NASA for another mission extension once Ultima is behind them.

He noted that at its current speed, New Horizons will be flying through the Kuiper Belt for almost a decade longer.

“We’re going to look for another flyby target, and we’re going to continue to observe Kuiper Belt objects with the telescopes on board,” he said. “If NASA approves that, there will be a third act.”
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steve2^4 · Dec 3, 2018

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...

Lanzman · Dec 3, 2018

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.

Bickendan · Dec 3, 2018

Bickendan said: ↑

gturner said: ↑

So do binary star systems fail as stars?
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You hear of any successful binary stars in Hollywood?
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Lanzman said: ↑

Bradjolina.
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Not anymore!

Tuckerfan · Dec 3, 2018

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

gturner said: ↑

So do binary star systems fail as stars?
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You hear of any successful binary stars in Hollywood?
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Lanzman said: ↑

Bradjolina.
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Not anymore!
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Beat you to that joke by 2 years to the day.

Bickendan · Dec 3, 2018

Tuckerfan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

gturner said: ↑

So do binary star systems fail as stars?
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You hear of any successful binary stars in Hollywood?
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Lanzman said: ↑

Bradjolina.
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Not anymore!
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Beat you to that joke by 2 years to the day.

View attachment 28064
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Ok, that's funny.

Bailey · Dec 3, 2018

I'm surprised and impressed that we can spot something twenty miles across at the distance of six light hours.

Tuckerfan · Dec 15, 2018

New Horizons sent back the first pic of Ultima Thule.

NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Captures New Images of Ultima Thule

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned new images captured on approach to its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule.

The new images of Ultima Thule were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), the high-resolution camera aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

The Kuiper Belt object was 4.01 billion miles (6.47 billion km) from the Sun and 24 million miles (38.7 million km) from the spacecraft when the images were captured.

“As the New Horizons spacecraft closes in on its target, Ultima Thule is getting brighter and brighter in the LORRI optical navigation images,” said New Horizons project scientist Dr. Hal Weaver, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

“It’s now standing out much more clearly among the sea of background stars.”

The images were taken just 33 hours before the December 2, 2018 course-correction maneuver that fine-tuned New Horizons’ trajectory for its rendezvous with Ultima Thule.

“At 8:55 a.m. EST, the spacecraft fired its small thrusters for 105 seconds, adjusting its velocity by just over 2.2 mph (1 m/s),” the mission team members said.

“The maneuver — the most distant trajectory correction ever made — was designed to keep New Horizons on track toward its ideal arrival time and closest distance to Ultima, just 2,200 miles (3,500 km) at 12:33 a.m. EST on January 1, 2019.”
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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.

Tuckerfan · Dec 17, 2018

Countdown clock for arrival at Ultima Thule.

Steal Your Face · Dec 17, 2018

Tuckerfan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

Bickendan said: ↑

gturner said: ↑

So do binary star systems fail as stars?
Click to expand...

You hear of any successful binary stars in Hollywood?
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Lanzman said: ↑

Bradjolina.
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Not anymore!
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Beat you to that joke by 2 years to the day.

View attachment 28064
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Tuckerfan · Dec 19, 2018

Tuckerfan · Dec 22, 2018

Thankfully, we'll still get data from New Horizons, even if the government is shutdown when it flys by Ultima Thule.

So, operations aboard the International Space Station will continue pretty much as before, and NASA won't have to cancel important upcoming spaceflight events such as the OSIRIS-REx probe's Dec. 31 orbital insertion around the asteroid Bennu, or the New Horizons spacecraft's Jan. 1 flyby of the distant object Ultima Thule.
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Which is good, because it looks like Ultima Thule is weird.

Ultima Thule Shines a Puzzling Light As New Horizons Spacecraft Approaches

There's something weird going on with Ultima Thule, the distant object that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will fly by just 10 days from now.

New Horizons team members don't think the 23-mile-wide (37 kilometers) Ultima is spherical; rather, the available data suggest that it's elongated or is perhaps even composed of two close-orbiting bodies. So, mission scientists were expecting to see a substantial "light curve" from Ultima: significant changes in brightness corresponding to different orientations of the object as it rotates.

But that's not what New Horizons observations in the lead-up to the epic New Year's Day encounter have shown. Instead, Ultima's brightness is relatively constant, like that of a spherical body. [NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

"It's really a puzzle," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement yesterday (Dec. 20). "I call this Ultima's first puzzle — why does it have such a tiny light curve that we can't even detect it? I expect the detailed flyby images coming soon to give us many more mysteries, but I did not expect this, and so soon."

Team members have come up with several possible explanations. For example, maybe Ultima's pole of rotation just happens to be pointed directly at New Horizons, minimizing the brightness variations seen by the spacecraft.

It's also possible that Ultima, which lies more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from the sun, is surrounded by a light-blocking cloud of dust, like the coma around a comet's nucleus. But an energy source would be required to generate such a feature, and it's unclear what that source would be. (The sun couldn't do the trick way out in Ultima's cold, dark environs, mission team members said.)

"An even more bizarre scenario is one in which Ultima is surrounded by many tiny, tumbling moons," Anne Verbiscer, a New Horizons assistant project scientist at the University of Virginia, said in the same statement. "If each moon has its own light curve, then together, they could create a jumbled superposition of light curves that make it look to New Horizons like Ultima has a small light curve."

If this is what's going on, it would be unprecedented. No solar system body is known to have such a satellite setup, Verbiscer said.

"It's hard to say which of these ideas is right," Stern said. "Perhaps it's even something we haven't even thought of. In any case, we'll get to the bottom of this puzzle soon — New Horizons will swoop over Ultima and take high-resolution images on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, and the first of those images will be available on Earth just a day later. When we see those high-resolution images, we'll know the answer to Ultima's vexing, first puzzle. Stay tuned!"

The flyby will peak at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1, when New Horizons zooms within a mere 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of Ultima's reddish surface. That's more than three times closer than the probe got to Pluto during a historic encounter with the dwarf planet in July 2015.

Ultima, which is officially known as 2014 MU69, has been in a deep freeze in the far outer solar system for more than 4.5 billion years. So, studying the object up close should reveal key insights about the solar system's earliest days, mission team members have said.
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steve2^4 · Dec 22, 2018

Or maybe it's a monolith...

Tuckerfan · Jan 1, 2019

Tuckerfan · Jan 1, 2019

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

steve2^4 · Jan 2, 2019

That's no peanut: it's a cosmic bowling pin.

Tuckerfan · Jan 2, 2019

Better pic of the giant space peanut has been released. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html

ed629 · Jan 2, 2019

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.

RickDeckard · Jan 3, 2019

This sums up how impressive that is.

Some things are almost too extraordinary to comprehend. Take what is almost the smallest and simplest measurement from the New Horizons space probe which has just passed Ultima Thule: it is travelling at 32,000 miles an hour, a speed that is more than 50 times faster than anyone alive on Earth has travelled – unless they are a military pilot or an astronaut. In fact, it’s close to magic: Puck boasts in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he can girdle the Earth in 40 minutes; New Horizons could do it in 50. This is not an easy speed at which to control anything. Yet, while moving that fast, and so far from Earth that it takes radio signals, travelling at the speed of light, more than six hours to reach it, the probe has been flown within 2,400 miles of a lump of rock 20 miles long which is itself hurtling through space in an orbit it has kept since before the Earth was formed.
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Tuckerfan · Jan 3, 2019

Tuckerfan · Jan 5, 2019

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.

After Ultima Thule Flyby, New Horizons Hits Pause on Data Dump

The New Horizons spacecraft fell silent yesterday (Jan. 4), but the communications pause is expected, and scientists on the mission will have plenty of data to keep them busy during the intermission, mission staff members said during a news conference held Jan. 3.

The data blackout will last for about five days, mission principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute said during the event, which was held to publicize new discoveries about the Kuiper Belt object the probe just visited, called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule. The spacecraft is due to begin transmitting again on Jan. 10.

The intermission was triggered by the spacecraft's present location on the far side of the sun, which produces interference that prevents data transmission back to Earth via radio waves. (This isn't a unique problem; the Parker Solar Probe, although billions of miles away from New Horizons, experiences download breaks for precisely the same reason.)

Once New Horizons and the sun align more favorably, the data dump will resume — although it won't be fast. All told, it will take about 20 months for all the data currently trapped on the probe to be sent back down to Earth. That data includes "literally hundreds of images and spectra and other data types," Stern promised.

But just because there's no new data coming in doesn't mean the scientists will be twiddling their thumbs. "Even while the spacecraft is behind the sun, the science team will continue to work on the data we have," Stern said during the news conference.

The group will reunite in about two weeks, after transmission begins again, to review what they've found in the dataalready on Earth and in the first data down after the blackout. "I expect there will be some pretty good news, so you'll be hearing from us again in a little over two weeks with those additions to what we've already learned about this wondrous place," Stern said.
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Video at the link. BTW, Ultima Thule is as red as Mars.

Paladin · Jan 7, 2019

Tuckerfan said: ↑

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.

After Ultima Thule Flyby, New Horizons Hits Pause on Data Dump

The New Horizons spacecraft fell silent yesterday (Jan. 4), but the communications pause is expected, and scientists on the mission will have plenty of data to keep them busy during the intermission, mission staff members said during a news conference held Jan. 3.

The data blackout will last for about five days, mission principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute said during the event, which was held to publicize new discoveries about the Kuiper Belt object the probe just visited, called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule. The spacecraft is due to begin transmitting again on Jan. 10.

The intermission was triggered by the spacecraft's present location on the far side of the sun, which produces interference that prevents data transmission back to Earth via radio waves. (This isn't a unique problem; the Parker Solar Probe, although billions of miles away from New Horizons, experiences download breaks for precisely the same reason.)

Once New Horizons and the sun align more favorably, the data dump will resume — although it won't be fast. All told, it will take about 20 months for all the data currently trapped on the probe to be sent back down to Earth. That data includes "literally hundreds of images and spectra and other data types," Stern promised.

But just because there's no new data coming in doesn't mean the scientists will be twiddling their thumbs. "Even while the spacecraft is behind the sun, the science team will continue to work on the data we have," Stern said during the news conference.

The group will reunite in about two weeks, after transmission begins again, to review what they've found in the dataalready on Earth and in the first data down after the blackout. "I expect there will be some pretty good news, so you'll be hearing from us again in a little over two weeks with those additions to what we've already learned about this wondrous place," Stern said.
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Video at the link. BTW, Ultima Thule is as red as Mars.
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Huh. I've been saying the name wrong, apparently. "Thule" is "thooley" not "thool."

Tuckerfan · Jan 19, 2019

Paladin said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

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.

After Ultima Thule Flyby, New Horizons Hits Pause on Data Dump

The New Horizons spacecraft fell silent yesterday (Jan. 4), but the communications pause is expected, and scientists on the mission will have plenty of data to keep them busy during the intermission, mission staff members said during a news conference held Jan. 3.

The data blackout will last for about five days, mission principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute said during the event, which was held to publicize new discoveries about the Kuiper Belt object the probe just visited, called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule. The spacecraft is due to begin transmitting again on Jan. 10.

The intermission was triggered by the spacecraft's present location on the far side of the sun, which produces interference that prevents data transmission back to Earth via radio waves. (This isn't a unique problem; the Parker Solar Probe, although billions of miles away from New Horizons, experiences download breaks for precisely the same reason.)

Once New Horizons and the sun align more favorably, the data dump will resume — although it won't be fast. All told, it will take about 20 months for all the data currently trapped on the probe to be sent back down to Earth. That data includes "literally hundreds of images and spectra and other data types," Stern promised.

But just because there's no new data coming in doesn't mean the scientists will be twiddling their thumbs. "Even while the spacecraft is behind the sun, the science team will continue to work on the data we have," Stern said during the news conference.

The group will reunite in about two weeks, after transmission begins again, to review what they've found in the dataalready on Earth and in the first data down after the blackout. "I expect there will be some pretty good news, so you'll be hearing from us again in a little over two weeks with those additions to what we've already learned about this wondrous place," Stern said.
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Video at the link. BTW, Ultima Thule is as red as Mars.
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Huh. I've been saying the name wrong, apparently. "Thule" is "thooley" not "thool."
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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.)

Tuckerfan · Feb 9, 2019

Turns out Ultima Thule isn't a peanut, it's a pancake!

New images of the distant Ultima Thule object have surprised scientists

Back in early January, when scientists pulled down their first batch of data from the New Horizons spacecraft, they celebrated an odd snowman-shaped object in the outer Solar System. From this first look, it appeared as though Ultima Thule, formally named 2014 MU69, consisted of two spheres in contact with one another—a contact binary.

Now that scientists have downloaded more data from the distant spacecraft, however, our view of Ultima Thule has changed. A sequence of images captured as New Horizons moved away from the object in the Kuiper Belt at a velocity of 50,000 km/hour, taken about 10 minutes after closest approach, show a much flatter appearance.

After analyzing these new images, scientists say the larger lobe more closely resembles a large pancake, and the smaller lobe looks a bit like a walnut. The new photos reveal a dramatically different object because they were taken from a different angle than the images that were downloaded first.

"We had an impression of Ultima Thule based on the limited number of images returned in the days around the flyby, but seeing more data has significantly changed our view," the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, said in a news release. "It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule's shape is flatter, like a pancake. But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We've never seen something like this orbiting the Sun."
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More at the link.

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