How NASA Glimpsed The Mysterious Object 'New Horizons' Will Reach In 2019 (popsci.com)

necro81 writes: After its successful flyby of Pluto in July 2015, the New Horizons probe received a mission extension to fly past a Kuiper Belt object -- named 2014 MU69 -- in January 2019. However, we know few details about the object -- its size, shape, albedo, whether it has any companions -- which are crucial for planning the flyby. Based on observations from Hubble, the New Horizons team knew that the object would pass in front of a star -- an occultation -- on July 17th, which could provide some of this data. But the occultation would last for less than a second, would only be visible in Patagonia, and the star itself is quite dim.

NASA set up 24 telescopes near one community to capture the event, and received lots of cooperation from locals: turning off streetlights, shutting down a nearby highway, and setting up trucks as windbreaks. At least five of those telescopes captured the occultation. This was the latest in a series of observations ahead of the flyby.
"We had to go up to farmers' doors and say 'Hi, we're here from NASA, we're wondering if we can set up telescopes in your back pasture?'" one astronomer told Popular Science. "More often than not people were like 'that sounds awesome, sure, we'll help out!'"

Comments

Old school

[Solandri]

"We had to go up to farmers' doors and say 'Hi, we're here from NASA, we're wondering if we can set up telescopes in your back pasture?'" one astronomer told Popular Science. "More often than not people were like 'that sounds awesome, sure, we'll help out!'"

That's what we used to do back in the old days when you wanted to set up your telescope in some rural area, away from the city lights, for a night's viewing. Ask for and get permission, and maybe have a pleasant conversation with a farmer who thinks what you're doing is really cool.

Nowadays people just fly their drone over someone's property unannounced, then act like they're the one whose rights were violated when the property owner shoots it down.

Not enough orbital telescopes

[Areyoukiddingme]

This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits. Instead of building more broken-by-design warplanes, we should be designing the next generation Hubble telescope. And no, the Webb telescope isn't a Hubble. Different frequencies. And, and this part is important, we should build eight copies of it, not just one, and send them to the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Sun and each of Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. (The Venus variant will be somewhat cheaper, 'cause we can skimp on solar panels.) Then we either need big fat radio telescopes at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, with multiple independent large antenna arrays, or we need to perfect laser data transmission in free space at solar system scales. I'm not sure which is smaller, a radio antenna array or the optics required to handle laser communication. I'm guessing the laser, since the frequencies are so much higher. If we have enough telescopes leading or following enough of the planets, we can use them as a network to bounce data around the Sun as necessary.

Let me be clear. I want so much incoming data that storing it all will prop up the hard drive manufacturing industry for a decade, because storing it all in flash memory would be too expensive. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start having NSA-style problems while looking for interesting things in an ocean of bytes. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start training neural nets as to what constitutes "interesting" and turning them loose on the ocean of bytes, because there isn't enough grad student slave labor to look at it all. I want astronomers to have a reason to hire engineers away from Google, because they have exa-scale data problems to deal with. I want all that and I'm not even an astronomer.

I just think it would be nice to have a proper map of the solar system we live in.