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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.
When talking about interplanetary distances, it is usually more intuitive to use AUs (the distance from the sun to the earth).
4000000000 miles = 43 AU. About 6 light-hours.
Astronomical Unit
lol "the verge". slashdot has really gone downhill.
It's Not much to see anyway
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
Not this close. The flyby trajectory past Pluto was selected so Pluto's gravity would redirect New Horizons to Ultima Thule. The spacecraft can only alter its trajectory by using its thrusters now. There was another potential target (pending funding from Congress for a mission extension).a bit more than a year from now, but the "encounter" will probably be distant, and mostly be limited to spectrographic comparison with observations from Earth. But you never know. We could get lucky and discover another KBO along the spacecraft's trajectory close enough to use thrusters for another close flyby.
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.