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New Horizons Reaches Ultima Thule
- Damark 8y agoAll systems green!
- Damark 8y agoThat’s good! It could been obliterated, and probably should have.
- Waterluvian 8y agoReading that page in reverse chronological order was kind of humbling; to see where we came from on a specific subject. It also reminded me of the astronomy course I took in university that taught me how much astronomy is about logical deduction. Deducing what must be there based on orbits and how it obscures light from stars, shadows, etc. And then going out there and validing all of it. That's beautiful.
- myth_buster 8y agoI found this thread by Alex Parker very informative and fascinating. https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1077986070128668674 https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1077986070128668674
- raverbashing 8y agoI second on the fascinating and informative And that was only the beginning of that mission
- atg_abhishek 8y agoWow this was an amazingly clear and accessible explanation of their process!
- born_a_beetle 8y agoamazing how much exciting work there is to do in planetary science (let alone anything having to do with Space).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- theshrike79 8y agoThe thread in an actually readable format: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1077986070128668674.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1077986070128668674.html
- RA_Fisher 8y agoSeems like a good time to reflect on the work: "Whitey on the Moon" https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4 https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4 It'd be one thing if this was private money, instead it comes out of the pocketbooks of those suffering. That's rarely acknowledged.
- eponeponepon 8y agoI think, if we want to play 'what-about', then it's fair to say that the cost of the New Horizons mission ("approximately $700 million over 15 years", per Wikipedia) is a drop in the ocean compared to the US Dept of Defence's direct spending on the 2003-2010 Iraq war, which was more than $700 billion, which came just as much out of the wallet of the US taxpayer (who is both rich and poor, and separately, both content and suffering), and as a little-known side-effect, killed a bunch more people than New Horizons has so far.
- RA_Fisher 8y agoI wouldn't say the Iraq war much justifies anything. What a tragedy?!
- stagger87 8y agoSpending on space exploration has been in debate and protested since the 60's, and probably even earlier than that. Not to say that it isn't worth discussing, only to counter the comment about being rarely acknowledged.
- ianai 8y agoNot to mention that government finances are nothing like private finances. Governments are assumed to be infinitely lived and their debt can always be paid by new debt. Debt isn’t the same thing for a government that it is for a private entity. For instance, only the government creates money. A Tbill is literally the government taking currency today and agreeing to give it out with interest over time. It was going to need to do that all along. I say NASA’s budget could be much greater. And employment for all could be guaranteed. Political movements to the otherwise are bad for society. They actively hurt society and guard against betterment. We’re talking dark ages vs progress.
- KineticLensman 8y agoNASA press release at [0], with a better (pre-flyby) image of Ultima Thule. [0] http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190101 http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...
- garmaine 8y agoThat’s the same image, rotated.
- dpflan 8y agoThe timing is sensational: humanity begins 2019 with an astronomical milestone event.
- dylan604 8y agoAnother one would be the Chinese landing their craft on the far side of the moon. No confirmed date, but within the next couple of days. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/01/680542096/chinas-lunar-lander-to-explore-moons-far-side https://www.npr.org/2019/01/01/680542096/chinas-lunar-lander...
- watersb 8y agoAlso, asteroid sample-return mission Osiris-REX acheived orbital insertion around its asteroid target. Which was Really Hard, because that is a tiny object to use as a gravitational anchor. About the mass of a terrestrial mountain. The precision is incredible. https://www.asteroidmission.org/ https://www.asteroidmission.org/
- eponeponepon 8y agoHas there been any talk of further fly-by targets? I seem to recall there were a number of possible candidates after the Pluto fly-by, but I suppose the Thule visit might have ruled some or all of those others out.
- KineticLensman 8y agoI haven't found a definitive 'no' but with a bit of quick googling - the current mission extension runs until (at least) 2021 and there is very little onboard fuel for significant course updates. Some of the other potential targets were in fact ruled out by the selection of Ultima Thule. The extended mission for New Horizons calls for the spacecraft to conduct observations of, and look for ring systems around, between 25 and 35 different KBOs.
- radarsat1 8y agoI'm curious what is the reason to think there would be ring systems around these objects? Aren't rings usually associated with planets much larger than earth, whereas these objects are much smaller?
- eponeponepon 8y agoLong-lasting rings would be - fundamentally all you need for a ring to form is some debris and a gravity well. To be clear, something that "doesn't last long" on an astronomical timescale could still quite happily exist stably for several dozen human lifetimes.
- FactolSarin 8y agoNothing concrete, but there probably will be another https://www.space.com/42808-nasa-new-horizons-possible-third-flyby.html https://www.space.com/42808-nasa-new-horizons-possible-third...
- KineticLensman 8y agoYour reference says that there will be continued exploration, but doesn't mention another actual fly-by. Funding beyond 2021 isn't confirmed, and even if they top up the funding, they can't top up the manoeuvring fuel.
- sidcool 8y agoLive press conference https://youtu.be/CyVVcImYg9E https://youtu.be/CyVVcImYg9E
- hirundo 8y agoMaybe this is the first visit to the future home of humanity, the Kuiper Belt. Vast lebensraum and resources for colonization. Not so much solar power, but we could fuse our own. When energy is cheap the next bottlenecks are surface area and mass. It seems like success would drive our descendants to mostly live in the belt. How disappointing if those images come back tomorrow and show that it's already occupied.
- KineticLensman 8y ago> Vast lebensraum and resources for colonization Well 'vast', yes, but not much else. Mainly rock and ices.
- garmaine 8y agoWhich are more valuable than metals.
- FlyMoreRockets 8y agoCertainly the ices. No need to go so far out for that though. Bennu likely has a fair bit of water as hydrates and there is a fair bit of water ice in Saturn's rings.
- garmaine 8y agoDon't be inner-solar-system-centric :) Once the frontier has been pushed back to the outer solar system, volatile KBO and Oort Cloud objects become the new frontier. We can imagine a distant future where humanity planet-hops from object to object, transforming these volatile rocks into vibrant cities each with their own culture.
- FlyMoreRockets 8y agoDon't mean to be an inner-solar-system-centric, but we all have to respect the economics of deltaVee. I'll grant you that if we're harvesting reaction mass from the Oort, it may become moot, provided we have some way to accelerate it to high velocity. Solar thermal probably isn't practical, there probably aren't practical concentrations of fuel for fusion and certainly not fission. I wonder if Mercury has relatively easily mined fissile material?
- aristophenes 8y agoWow. Scrolling backwards through the entries, how had I not seen this before? There’s a 3D movie exploring Pluto, I’m on my phone and it took me a minute to realize as I moved my phone around I could look all over at the scenery. Really great stuff!
- hodgesrm 8y agoIt's unbelievably cool to have a device in your hand that opens up the gates to the rest of the universe. Something for us all to remember the next time we're tempted to bash the evils of technology.
- MeteorMarc 8y agoThe likeness with the non-ultima Thule is pretty striking: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/rxEAAOxyQj9RMMlK/s-l300.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/rxEAAOxyQj9RMMlK/s-l300.jpg
- SOMA_BOFH 8y agonew horizons is exiting the solar system without a golden record or a golden plaque. seems like a waste of a very unique opportunity.
- jcranmer 8y agoFor the next 20-30k years, the Sun will be the closest star to this spacecraft. Any alien civilization capable of interstellar travel would probably be intelligent enough to reckon that the probe, if chanced upon within that timeframe, would originate from Sun and might pop over for a look. Beyond that timeframe, I'm not so sure a record would be in playable condition. Furthermore, if interstellar travel were actually possible, one would rather hope that humanity would have developed it by that point. All-in-all, it seems unlikely that a golden record would be all that useful.
- SOMA_BOFH 8y agoi'd think there would be very little erosion in interstellar space, even over billions of years. "Perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
- BurningFrog 8y agoWe shouldn't be exporting our gold outside the solar system. We need balanced trade with the rest of the galaxy!
- newnewpdro 8y agoI'm not convinced such artifacts add anything of significant probable value over what's already implied by a sophisticated space probe of obviously unnatural origin, should it be discovered intact by aliens.
- wazoox 8y ago"Thule" was named by the Greek navigator Pytheas from Massalia around 330 BC. Historians think it refers maybe to the Faeroe islands, Greenland, or more probably Iceland. From this point the name stuck to refer as the farthest place in the North, some cold unknown. In medieval times, "Thule" being Iceland, "Ultima Thule" referred to Greenland.
- foobarbazetc 8y agoActually... https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-named-its-next-new-horizons-target-ultima-thule-mythical-land-nazi-844318?amp=1 https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-named-its-next-new-horizons-ta...
- dfischer 8y agoSo cool.
- fattypouch 8y agoSHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT
- Santosh83 8y agoHere's an interesting article on this flyby by Phil Plait: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/get-ready-for-humanitys-most-distant-encounter-tonights-the-night-for-2014-mu69 https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/get-ready-for-humanitys-most-d...
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoNot sure why it wasn't more prominent, but for anyone else like that was wondering, "reaches" "zips by" and the other adjectives are indicating a distance of 2,200 miles. As a computer vision/imaging person, that's a pretty far look for a 75mm (~3 inch) mirror. It's like trying to take a picture of the Empire State building in NYC from Las Vegas with a tripod telescope.
- adrianN 8y agoAt least there is no pesky atmosphere in the way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 8y agoWont know that until the pics are in. A thin layer of gas, an atmosphere, is a possibility. Pluto had bit of one.
- nwallin 8y agoLORRI has a 8" primary mirror, not 3. Ralph has a 75mm mirror, but that's the secondary telescope; it does multispectral photography (6 bands) and infrared spectrometry. Even with such a small primary mirror, New Horizons has a number of advantages. First, Ultima Thule is larger than Manhattan. Not exactly large, but certainly bigger than the Empire State Building. Second, the mount is incredibly stable. There are basically no vibrations to speak of. As an amateur astronomer, I can tell you that the mount is one of the most important pieces of equipment in astrophotography. A mediocre telescope on a good mount will give good images. A good telescope on a mediocre mount will give mediocre images. Third, the mirror itself is much better designed and manufactured than the average amateur astronomer's scope. Certainly better than any of mine. Fourth, the sensor is cooled to very low temperatures, so it is way less noisy than the average consumer sensor. Fifth, there is no atmosphere in the way. This is a huge advantage. When all is said and done, LORRI will have a resolution on Ultima Thule's surface of about 60 feet. Certainly no Google Earth, but plenty good enough for the science objects of the flyby.
- rmdashrfstar 8y agoI’ve been working a side project to build a more mobile friendly and scroll friendly version of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day at http://lookupat.space http://lookupat.space The most recent update hopefully makes it a lot more useable with including both attribution of the work and an explanation of what the picture is about. As always, there is a link to the original page, and I plan on adding sorting features soon. I hope this helps more people get exposed to the beauty of outer space and the very awe inspiring things humans have done!
- adzm 8y agoThank you for this!!
- rmdashrfstar 8y agoThank you for being one of the first to visit and enjoy it! :D
- rossdavidh 8y agoAwesome page! Any chance it could have a "click here for the next page" version? Autoload of new content messes with my mouse/browser/head in ways I don't like. But, otherwise great site!
- rmdashrfstar 8y agoI was going for an instagram, infinite-scroll vibe, so a change to paginated would stray from the original intention a bit. Any particular reason you don’t like the autoload? I may just have a poor implementation of it. :) Thanks for checking out the site though, I appreciate it!
- theandrewbailey 8y agoCould you make it work without Javascript? Build pagination by default, then with JS, progressively enhance to infinite scroll. I had to enable JS for your domain and a few others before anything meaningful appeared. Your content turned out to be photos, which is something that you do not need JS for!
- cmurf 8y agoThis article says it will take ~20 months to transmit the image data; by September 2020. https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-spacecraft-captures-images-of-ultima-thule-in-farthest-flyby-of-space-object-in-our-solar-system https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-spacecraft-captures-ima...
- bpicolo 8y agoThat’s for all of it. I’d imagine we start getting pieces faster than that. Latency is 6 hours, speed is roughly a kilobit?
- solarengineer 8y agoMotivational videos by Erik Wernquist: New Horizons (for National Space Society): https://vimeo.com/132183032 https://vimeo.com/132183032 Wanderers: https://vimeo.com/108650530 https://vimeo.com/108650530 Casino's Grand Finale ( for JPL) : https://vimeo.com/210782375 https://vimeo.com/210782375
- jccooper 8y agoImages to be posted here as they come in: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/ http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/ Not much yet.