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NASA Spacecraft Confirms Successful Flyby of Distant Solar System Object (theverge.com)
NASA received a critical signal from one of its most distant spacecrafts this morning, confirming that the vehicle has just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System. From a report: That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant -- and most primitive -- object that's ever been visited by humanity. "We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feat. "We've just accomplished the most distant flyby."
"It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
"It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
4 billion miles? I have no idea if that is a small number or a big number!
4000000000 miles = 6437376000 kilometres.
OMG that is very, very far!
#DeleteFacebook
that must be a long way to walk...
The probe received a message saying "There is life here, long life. You are welcome to come and join us!". It was shortly followed by another message saying "Stay away!".
One small step for....
Pics or it didn't happen... ;)
Any more objects that it might be headed towards?
I hate fat people.
In what sense is it primitive? Still running a 32bit 2.4 kernel? Did the probe get showered with spears and arrows as it flew past?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Looks like you've never spent time to develop an intuition for how far away the sun is. It's a one-time investment, and then you can understand every distance given in AU.
This link is stolen from an AC that responded to you, inexplicably down-modded despite having very useful information:
Ultima Thule pictures
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission ...
The coincidence is delicious, David Bowman, after all, being one of the characters from Kubrik's 2001 A Space Odyssey.
It isn't the federal government out of control, it is the rest of us. Any threat to SS and Medicare (the biggest part of the budget) is met with angst, and threats of revenge. Americans also like the rest of the world not being run by those nice Chinese and Russians. How about that farm bill, gotta fund those family farms even if most of it goes to corporate farms.
To make matters worse, the Republicans decided to pay off their corporate masters and gave them a tax decrease which they promptly spent on share buy-backs so the long suffering corporate officers were not inconvenienced. Trillion dollar deficits are now built in.
When the Fed decides to reel in the easy money policy, Bozo the Wonder President decides it is the reason the stock market stinks rather than the 19th century tariffs as he tries to turn the 21st century economy into the 19th century's. And yet, his "base" thinks he's the Second Coming for screwing those naughty immigrants who want to come here and work and help replace the Americans who are no longer being born at replacement rate. And, in a world where understanding other cultures is necessary to have any sort of decent exports, Bozo and his base have decided they don't need no stinking culture.
Here's what Bozo himself thinks of his base:
"I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot someone, and I still wouldn't lose any voters"
In light of this, every single one of his delirious, unbelievably moronic tweets suddenly make perfect sense, considering who they are directed to.
You NPCs are funny.
The probe is going about 8 miles per second. The object is about 20 miles across. That means it passes the distance of the object's size in less than 3 seconds.
At closest approach, the object appears roughly the apparent size of our moon from Earth according to one article.
Thus, if you were sitting on the probe, and put your thumb out and up next to Thule, held it steady and closed one eye, your thumb would cover the distance of it in about 3 seconds.
It also means the probe only has a minute or two to use its instruments near closest approach. The fly-by speed is almost comparable to watching a high plane fly overhead.
Being the probe has to swivel its entire body to aim each instrument, that's a lot of dancing in a short time slot. (Some instruments point the same direction to save swiveling.) Further, the exact position wasn't precisely known ahead of time, so many instruments and cameras have to scan an area larger than the target to be sure they cover it.
Operators sent a "timing correction" to the probe a couple of days ago they said was a 2-second shift, applying updated navigation info using recent probe photos (when Thule was still a spec). I can see why 2 seconds makes a difference at that speed.
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry to steal your link man, at the time I posted you were at -1. Glad to see you getting the recognition you deserve...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When the Fed decides to reel in the easy money policy
When did this happen exactly and by what mechanism? Federal overspending hasn't ebbed significantly in your lifetime. Trying to turn this into partisan horseshit is what's keeping the country down as a whole. You're part of the problem.
At least someone is. You certainly aren't.
Cue the "NASA hasn't put a man on Mars so it's useless" wailing.
The Fed in this context is the Federal Reserve Board, not Congress. So you're way off base.
For being NPCs, we sure seem to be effective at keeping Trump from wasting money on dumb fucking walls and repealing healthcare laws, dontcha think?
Don't forget that tomorrow the majority of the US will be celebrating our newest holiday - Investigation Day.
Trump better start limbering up for all that butt-sex he'll be getting in prison.
1 AU is roughly 389x the distance to the Moon. 3,735x the circumference of the Earth. Or about 31 million times the distance to the horizon when standing at sea level.
In other words, so much larger than anything you have any frame of reference to, that you have no possibility of truly understanding it in those terms - the human brain starts having real problems accurately visualizing even a 1000x difference in scale, most people have trouble with even 100x.
If you want to visualize anything in astronomy, you need to develop a completely different frame of reference to do so. And the distance to the sun is one of the most natural (and thus, intuitive) reference frames for us to use to visualize distances in the solar system.
As someone once said - "The nipple is the only truly intuitive user interface, everything else is learned". By the same token any "intuitive" tool for thought must actually be learned - "inuitive" just means that it's as relevant as possible to your realm of experience. For distances in space, the distance to our sun is the only such thing on remotely the right scale.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I LOL'd! :-D
First, there is massive delayed gratification here -- like 12 years of flight time? And probably many more years of planning and construction.
At any point, from moment of launching, to swinging around Pluto, something could have gone wrong with the spacecraft.
And then this one-minute photo-shoot of this last object the spacecraft is likely to see before it spends a lonely decade in space and maybe can't hear voices from home anymore.
I cannot imagine the levels of anxiety of the dozens of people most dedicated to this mission around the minutes of the flyby, and the six hours before getting some confirmation that the spacecraft successfully captured good data. Wow! Maybe the only way to cope is to be working on several missions at the same time, to have an emotional cushion when things go bad on any one mission.
It must be a HUGE thrill for the team right now! They did it! And now it will be a stream of images and measurements, and advancements in science. The feeling of pride for such an achievement must be tremendous -- life long, and part of human history.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
So cool! Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, both 41 years of flight time, 145 AU and 120 AU from Earth, respectively (compared to 43 AU of upstart New Horizons, ha ha).
According to the JPL site, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 "communicate with NASA daily". Must be a little joy each day to receive a note (sent 20 hours earlier!) from these two spacecraft brothers.