NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is about the make the most distant planetary flyby in the history of spaceflight, and you can follow the action live.
At 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1, New Horizons will zoom past the small object Ultima Thule, which lies 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the realm of icy bodies known as the Kuiper Belt.
I forgot the time lag in communication and was expecting images earlier this morning. At any rate I think they go live again at 9:45am this morning and hopefully will have some data to show by 10 or 10:30am.
Please don't tell me they forgot to take the lens cover off.
"Sometimes the truth does taste like worms," to quote villain Martin Landau in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Of course that was before he visited Ultima Thule in SPACE 1999.
Which may or may not include images of the rock. They cant guarantee it's in the camera sights.
They did for Pluto. If missile systems on fighter aircraft can use radar homing and locking 'vision,' then future missions should incorporate an equivalent type of system. Having said that, they tracked Ultima on a continuous basis, so there's no reason to suppose they buggered up where New Horizons was supposed to be pointing as it whizzed by.
During the Pluto rendezvous, New Horizons had to gyrate all over the place in order to include all the moons in it's point and shoot schedule. With Ultima, it seems they directed the probe to make small off-centre adjustments just to take into consideration small errors that might have crept in over where New Horizons 'thought' the centre of Ultima Thule would be during the flyby. I'm confident they got more than just an arm or a leg.
SUCCESS! We flew by a 30 mile wide peanut. Seriously, they still don't know if its one or two objects, and the low res image are still pixelated. But they know they got the science data and all instruments had their eyes on Ultima. High resolution pictures will be shown tomorrow.
I'm gonna play Mountain Visions non-stop and get my papier-mache gear full on between now and the first picture, in the best of Neary/Guiler remote viewing SRI tradition.
Which may or may not include images of the rock. They cant guarantee it's in the camera sights.
They did for Pluto. If missile systems on fighter aircraft can use radar homing and locking 'vision,' then future missions should incorporate an equivalent type of system. Having said that, they tracked Ultima on a continuous basis, so there's no reason to suppose they buggered up where New Horizons was supposed to be pointing as it whizzed by
Regardless of what you say or think, that's what they said.
SUCCESS! We flew by a 30 mile wide peanut. Seriously, they still don't know if its one or two objects, and the low res image are still pixelated. But they know they got the science data and all instruments had their eyes on Ultima. High resolution pictures will be shown tomorrow.
TOMORROW?!?!?!?! You mean we have to wait until TOMORROW to see pictures!?
Regardless of what you say or think, that's what they said.
New Horizons probably has an internal 'map' of the Celestial Sphere embedded somewhere in memory, fixed within the variables/constants segment. I would think the SWRI team would perform some kind of triangulation routine, whereby the camera used to obtain field of view snapshots can correlate star fixes so that New Horizons can essentially establish which way is 'up' within the coordinate system being used to determine New Horizon's frame of reference within the Solar System. This is something they can pinpoint with a high degree of confidence.
The main problem, as I understand it in admittedly inexact terms, is that Ultima Thule has a certain range of probabilities about it for which some things that need to be absolute can only be estimated. It is these probabilities, such as the precise distance of New Horizons to Ultima Thule that have to be weighed up by whatever means are available to the New Horizons team. With estimation methods such as these, the range of error increases the closer New Horizons gets to the target. It's like that QM paradox where the more you know about one particular thing, the less you know of some other particular thing.
What will it look like? We kind of know it has a resemblance to comet 67P, only a bit longer and thinner with lobes on each end. Maybe a bit like a bone with one end slightly larger than the other? Perhaps more smooth and rounded than 67P, which has that neck region which is being eaten away a bit more with each close approach to the Sun. But UT is sequestered far from the Sun and being more undisturbed, will it show less signs of having boulders and a rough looking surface with regolith scattered about, which we see on Bennu and Ryugu?
