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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.
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.
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.