Comments on: New New Horizons Kuiper Object Photograph

By: StevoR

StevoR — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 13:31:58 +0000

Incidentally, if people here are wondering when we’ll get more info & better images from Ultima Thule then this explains the why & when :

https://www.space.com/42903-new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby-data-intermission.html

Basically, we’ll need to wait another week or so for more :

By: StevoR

StevoR — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 12:30:05 +0000

In reply to Roger Lambert.

Hint this wasn’t (still isn’t) the end of the day and we learn fascinating and potentially useful things.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-03/new-horizons-picture-ultima-thule-looks-like-snowman-nasa-says/10680874

Your lack of vision, sense of wonder and imagination here makes me pity you.

By: Tyvor Winn

Tyvor Winn — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 02:59:00 +0000

Most exploration is costly but there’s usually a payoff of some sort — sooner or later — that in hindsight justifies the expense. The relatively cheap exploration has already been done and now further exploration takes enough money to require government sponsorship.

It may even take enough money that we won’t be able to build the Great Wall of America that will make us great again, or the tens of thousands of troops needed to patrol it.

By: Roger Lambert

Roger Lambert — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 14:19:28 +0000

In reply to Roger Lambert. Okay, okay. I stand corrected. Plus, it's not a rock. It's a snowball.

By: BBD

BBD — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 14:07:04 +0000

In reply to Roger Lambert. The Ultima Thule flyby was a bolt-on at the end of the New Horizons mission, which was aimed a little higher than spending a gazillion bucks to look at a space rock:

New Science The National Academy of Sciences has ranked the exploration of the Kuiper Belt – including Pluto – of the highest priority for solar system exploration. Generally, New Horizons seeks to understand where Pluto and its moons “fit in” with the other objects in the solar system, such as the inner rocky planets (Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury) and the outer gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, belong to a third category known as "ice dwarfs." They have solid surfaces but, unlike the terrestrial planets, a significant portion of their mass is icy material. Using Hubble Space Telescope images, New Horizons team members have discovered four previously unknown moons of Pluto: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. A close-up look at these worlds from a spacecraft promises to tell an incredible story about the origins and outskirts of our solar system. New Horizons is exploring – for the first time – how ice dwarf planets like Pluto and Kuiper Belt bodies have evolved over time.

But if you hate taxes and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, I can see why you might want to whistle up the dogs over this.

By: Roger Lambert

Roger Lambert — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 11:50:32 +0000

Nice to know we can spend a gazillion bucks, but get…. another pic of a rock. OK, a space rock.

Yes, this was likely the most difficult, most technically-challenging procedure to get a picture of a rock. But, at the end of the day…..

By: Christopher Winter

Christopher Winter — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 21:45:04 +0000

The tale of the occultations is very cool. For their first try, they sent two teams of about 15 people each to different parts of the globe. They set up the scopes and got nothing.

Their second chance was over water, so they used the SOFIA aircraft — and got nothing.

For their third try, they went to South America. The sky was clear, but wind gusts kept shaking the telescopes. Local people helped out by moving in a pickup truck as a shield, and using a tarpaulin. But they got nothing. It turned out their computed position for Ultima Thule was off by 600 miles.

Their fourth opportunity was just a week away. They scrambled to the location, set up — and got what they wanted. Crunching all that data gave them a very close idea of what Ultima Thule turned out to look like.

You can watch all this in the Nova special.