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NASA Releases First Clear Images of Distant Kuiper Belt Object (engadget.com)
NASA's New Horizons team has released the promised first images from its history-making flyby of (486958) 2014 MU69. "The snapshots, captured from as close at 17,000 miles away, show that the 21-mile-long Kuiper Belt object is a 'contract binary' where two spheres slowly collided and fused with each other," reports Engadget. "The two may have linked up '99 percent of the way' to the start of the Solar System, Johns Hopkins University APL said." From the report: Capturing a true representation of 2014 MU69 is difficult, at least with the initial batch of pictures. There's a visible light camera onboard the New Horizons Probe (shown on the left), but the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (center) is much sharper. To create an accurate image (on the right), scientists had to produce a composite. Higher-resolution pictures and additional scientific data will keep flowing over the "next weeks and months," the New Horizons team said.
that object is thousands times farther than the moon, we should be glad itâ(TM)s possible to get any image at all... anyway better pictures will come, itâ(TM)s just a matter of waiting.
originally named it Ultima Thule because the term infers that it's "beyond the limits of the known world." In practice, though, it also carries racist connotations.
Where are the scientists who named the object and what shirts are they wearing?! It's time for another public shaming and apology, right? Good grief...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
17,000 times the average distance to the moon. Raw images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/ - of course, it's not worth trying to convince the kind of people who believe Earth is flat and humans have never gone to Moon that these are real. In the linked article, the short version: Left image is color picture, middle image is higher-resolution black and white one, and the rightmost is a composite with colors from the color image and finer features from the black and white one.
It's worth remembering that at that distance from the Sun there's barely any light, and at the closest approach 2014 MU69 passes the probe's field of vision in less than 3 seconds at their incident speeds - and due to the distance they weren't even sure which three seconds! It's a remarkable feat all in all, there's higher resolution images hopefully yet to come during the almost two year data-return window, but it isn't going to be perfectly in focus long-exposure HDR photography.
Is this some sort of asteroid wedding, or business agreement, or something??!!!
Yes, they are lying to us all to maintain the secret that the Earth is flat. You're such a genius.
Attention nazi morons, "aryan" refers to Iranians. You've been wearing an Indian good luck charm backwards and calling yourselves Iranians. Great job burning those books though, derp?
Looks like BB-8 to me.
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
Seriously people like you want me to stop using sites like this. Thanks for making my faith in mankind yet again.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Getting the data is hard enough. They're lucky when they can download at 1 kbps, and roughly 1 in every 10 bits is an error. It's going to take 20 months to download all of the data from this encounter.
Much better images are coming (even today we'll get somewhat better images), but it's going to take time. "Visually appealing images" are also competing against other scientific data for bandwidth. The best pictures will be about 4 times better resolution (on each axis). Also, this first picture was almost "dead on" with respect to the sun, which hides surface contours; later pictures will be at steeper angles, which will show the surface much better.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
"Thule" and "Ultima Thule" generally referred to Iceland and Greenland, and has been used to refer to distant lands for millennia. It's unfair that one particular group's cooption of the term is supposed to have ruined it.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
It's gizmodo. The them, "nazis" mean people politically to the right of Marx and Lenin. I suspect that NASA scientists, being normal people and not batshit insane far leftists do indeed fall into that category.
These days, the only rational response to "That's racist (or nazist)" is: "And?". That, or you just ignore these people.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
there a plenty of rocks you can photograph right here on this planet!
Some of them even manage to post on /. !
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
From the Engadget article:
Scientists named originally named it Ultima Thule because the term infers that it's "beyond the limits of the known world." In practice, though, it also carries racist connotations. Nazis and other white supremacists use the term to refer to a mythological homeland for their culture. NASA and the New Horizons team told Newsweek that they'd kept the name because of its more innocent meaning, but it's hard to shake that stigma.
That's in your mind. Thule and Ultima Thule are names with mythological origin and have been used by explorers for centuries. Ultima doesn't mean "beyond" btw., just last, farthest, and that's how the name is usually used. Ultima Thule is "the edge of the world" or "the most distant land". If your first association is "Nazis use this name", then your mind has become tainted.
The words or their meanings are not racist. Only a few knuckleheads interpretations, one of which appears to write for Slashdot.
Quit injecting racism into everything.
It's unfair that one particular group's cooption of the term is supposed to have ruined it.
Same goes for the swastika symbol. Eastern countries don't seem to mind, though, you can still see plenty of swastikas marking religious places on maps in China, Japan, India,... Although most of them seem to have agreed to stick to the mirror image of the nazi version. (They used to use both without any particular preference for one over the other).
Imagine if we could get a sample of this thing and study it in a lab. And not just collecting a spray of dust but sending someone/something with a shovel to get a solid piece. A relic of the early solar system.
Hey Geb,
Your trailer internet connection is getting a bit slow. Better fire up the generator!
And the swastika is a Buddhist religious symbol. Yeah, it doesn't work like that.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We had a kid at school like you. Not quite sure what happened to him. I think he works at the mall collecting the trolleys.
Just a pawn in their game.
Looks like the Mandelbrot set in 3D!
We found a rock!
And the thing they talk about most in the linked article is how the current name of the object might be offensive to some people. I wonder how much further along we would be as a society if we were more concerned about science and real progress instead of spending so much time on useless shit like 'who might be offended'?
If you ask a random person what Thule means, you will find that the connotation is insider knowledge. Outside of Nazi and Antifa circles, the name is mostly unknown or known for its original meaning. The only people who are offended by this name are seeking to be offended. This is a teachable moment: The far left and the far right will gladly throw progress under the bus in order to fuel the fire. Fuck them all.
don't feed the trolls please. This image is clearly part of the elaborate hoax by 'scientists' to debunk the truth that the world is flat.
The planet of the first part duly hear by agrees to rest against the planet of the second part and tumble if space until acted upon by a planet of the third part.
It does though. The swastika was never in widespread use in Europe, so after the war it disappeared again. But to this day the German army displays the Schwarzes Kreuz, which is a combination of the Balkenkreuz used by the Nazis, and the cross pattée (also used by some extreme right wing groups), and very similar in appearance to both. Why? Because it is a very common symbol in the west, used before time out of mind - not just in Germany - and not considered to be tainted by Nazi use.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If you ask a random person what Thule means, you will find that
... most of them think it's a company that makes roof racks and Kayak racks for cars.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I see the same display floating every day ... in my toilet bowl.
It does though. The swastika was never in widespread use in Europe, so after the war it disappeared again. But to this day the German army displays the Schwarzes Kreuz, which is a combination of the Balkenkreuz used by the Nazis, and the cross pattée (also used by some extreme right wing groups), and very similar in appearance to both. Why? Because it is a very common symbol in the west, used before time out of mind - not just in Germany - and not considered to be tainted by Nazi use.
Not widespread, but it wasn't unknown either. One of the Scandinavian countries, I think Finland but not sure, had the Swastika on their planes before, during, and for sometime after the Nazi rule in Germany. There are examples of Swastikas used in patterns and designs in Europe prior Nazi use too.
So yeah, it wasn't common before the Nazis (not like, say the star, cross, or moon symbols) but it did have some limited usage that it can't enjoy anymore.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you ask a random person what Thule means, you will find that the connotation is insider knowledge. Outside of Nazi and Antifa circles, the name is mostly unknown or known for its original meaning. The only people who are offended by this name are seeking to be offended. This is a teachable moment: The far left and the far right will gladly throw progress under the bus in order to fuel the fire. Fuck them all.
My undergraduate degree is in history. One of my primary interests is World War II, so I would like to think I am relatively informed regarding Nazi ideology, mythology, and iconography. I can't recall "Ultima Thule" ever mentioned in reference to Nazism. Apparently it was a fringe belief within the occult circles which were themselves a fringe belief within the Nazi Party? Occultism in the Nazi party is already heavily exaggerated and overblown anyway. Was there some of it there? Probably. Himmler was pretty messed up and did some crazy things within the SS. I think some if has to do with some people's inability to (or desire not to) come to terms with the fact that what happened in WWII was done by regular, ordinary every day people, so they have to rationalize it as them being monsters or possessed by demons or something.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What they are implying, is that all of north-European pre-Christian mythology is racist by definition.
Which is funny, because
1. that makes *them* prejudiced and hateful against other cultures, and
2. racism was coined as the name for the ideology of thinking there is such a thing as races! (Biology has no such concept, dear Americans. And neither does the rest of the world, especially us Germans.)
It's simply their ancient mythological name for some nirvana/heaven-like place.
That the Nazis were nostalgically fascinated by that like hipsters are in ugly 50s furniture today, does not taint it, unless you really are deliberately looking for something to pull out of your ass to hate/shame/bully people with, and have a "guilty by association" mindset like the Nazis.
It's gizmodo. The them, "nazis" mean people politically to the right of Marx and Lenin.
No, it means people who believe in the political and social ideals of the Nazi party from the German Reich such as social Darwinism, and nationalism. The vast majority of people are politically to the right of Marx and Lenin; but the vast majority of people are NOT Nazis.
Nazis approved of asserting the rights of their nation over others, they saw it as a legitimate survival of the fittest. They believed in promoting people from their nation and keeping people to be perceived of other nations and races out of their lands. The rich were rich because they were better. They believed in ultimate authority from the top- and believed journalists and lower level politicians should not question the ultimate leader. They believed in the inferiority of other races and people who had certain religious beliefs.
All the above does apply to some people in the US today (I won't get political and name names), but it certainly is not a majority of people, nor even a majority of people right of Lenin.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"Prejudiced asshole!"
Or just go bonkers, and loudly yell "SOP RAPING CHILDREN, YOU SICK FUCK!". :)
And stay completely serious, like they just offered you to rape their dungeon children. Commit all the way, and only double down, as confidently as Trump. ^^
If they can invent bullshit accusations, they have now met their masters.
Stop defending yourselves (or worse, flopping over, and agreeing, like you did) when they haven't validated their hate speech in the first place!
SJWs are actually the most prejudiced and hateful of all.
They are like Gestapo/DHS officers. Always "finding" something to terrorize you or deport you if they can.
Just that SJWs were powerless weakling losers before they realized they could simply command the masses, by triggering thought-terminating clichees that create peer pressure and shaming, and then act like they are *the victims*.
Is "reverse bullying" an already known term?
just call it Groundnut, as per shape
Here's a better article, that doesn't prattle about Nazis: http://www.astronomy.com/news/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thank you for this informative post. I am glad that people appreciate this remarkable achievement and the crazy ones are still a minority.
As you said, considering object's reflectivity and size, sunlight at this distance, the probe speed, uncertainty (or error) of the orbit calculation it is remarkable that we have images at all. NASA (in this case Alan Stern and his team from applied physics at Johns Hopkins University) makes these amazing achievements look so easy.
I recommend a book "Chasing New Horizons", which gives an idea of how much devotion and efforts is behind these short news reports and images we enjoy.
We know you mean Republicans. It's not like you're shy about this sort of thing. Trump=Nazi, anyone who wants a sane immigration policy=Nazi. The deplorables.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Because New Horizons is so far from Earth, the post-contact strategy on both flybys has been the same: send all of the JPGs first, then send the higher-res Raw images. This assures that in case of failure during this process, which will take months, we get the most data up front.
The most important finding we could get from this flyby is information about composition of the object. Are these spaceballs a mixture of rock and volatiles, like scoops of Rocky Road ice cream with real rocks? That could explain why when two of them come into slow contact, they squash together and remain in contact, rather than breaking into smaller pieces. This could tell us a lot about planetary formation.
The hoax is spreading to an international level. The Chinese were duped into thinking their government landed on the far side of the moon! When really it was made in a Beijing basement (Perhaps, some Hong Kong outsourcing too). They learned that its best to confuse the masses with dreams of grandeur than to directly confront the truth of the Flat Earth.
It's unfair that one particular group's cooption of the term is supposed to have ruined it.
Damn those Greeks!
#DeleteChrome
We know you mean Republicans. It's not like you're shy about this sort of thing.
Not at all. Most Republicans are not even close to Nazi-ism.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This isn't actually about the far left or the far right at all. It's about the media finding the 3 people in the world they can slip a buck to in order to have them create a controversy to write about. The controversy then generates all sorts of outrage from people about how horrible it is that anyone would get offended over such a stupid thing and [insert political bias], which makes it go viral, and ka-ching!
This space intentionally left blank
YHBT. If you want to get "further along as a society" (I guess that means you think people are becoming less easy to manipulate, as opposed to more easy? (*)) then the right move would be to not have replied to the troll.
You know, the oldest and the only known-successful way for dealing with trolls, that anyone has ever thought of. The one thing where, if you're not doing it, then you're helping the troll. You basically approved the made-up racism that was being claimed. Good job.
(*) IMHO you couldn't be wronger about that. I think that as we get further along as a society, we'll be fighting more, saying stupid things to troll each other more, and self-imprisoning ourselves more.
Yeah, most Germans were not Nazi either... even though they did their part to support it. Especially when it all fell down... See "I was not a Nazi Polka" then check out "Your Friendly Liberal Neighborhood Ku Klux Klan."
The smart side of the stupid republicans now are "independent" again and back to saying "both sides are corrupt." Like they were at the end of the Bush years! It is a false equivalence that can't be left alone so they go into hiding without learning anything until their next horrible mistake pushes them into denial again. Not being in touch with reality is how this stuff repeats and it has been getting worse each cycle. Their defense reactions keep them from learning from their own history, let alone recorded history.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Nazis approved of asserting the rights of their nation over others, they saw it as a legitimate survival of the fittest. They believed in promoting people from their nation and keeping people to be perceived of other nations and races out of their lands. The rich were rich because they were better. They believed in ultimate authority from the top- and believed journalists and lower level politicians should not question the ultimate leader. They believed in the inferiority of other races and people who had certain religious beliefs.
Umh? I think you just described every country and culture in the world at that time, and a large percentage (if not a vast majority) of the cultures and countries in the world today.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No "Ultima Thule" but I know about "Thule" and also Hyperborea (a mythical Northern and polar continent which happened to be mentioned in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atantis, a 1992 video game)
Maybe you played it already, it's a very good game. Early on you meet Sophia I think, she's giving a crackpot conference on the Hyperborean civilization with some mystical tones or occultism. You sabotage her conference, some events play out and then you'll be looking for Atlantis (built by the Hyperboreans in this game) across the Atlantic and Mediterranean etc. There are Nazis, but they are Indiana Jones Nazis looking for a powerful artifact or energy source to take over the world.
It's fantasy but made to look it's historically researched (it is indeed the Ancients Greeks who made up Hyperborea and Atlantis). Back then we felt like it's based on the script for an unreleased movie. It does mix this up a bit with the late 19th c. occultism craze. (funny moments about Indy not believing that bullshit and Sophia's offended and defends her works and views). This also has a little bit of historical significance.
I think they really researched the scenario well - decades later I'm navigating on wikipedia to the page about this guy whose some ideas were used in the game's crackpot conference! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Charroux
No mention of Thule in the game.
Some neo-nazis may be slightly interested in Thule but it's mostly interest about a Nordic master race and they might co-opt runes and other Nordic things into their imagery. E.g. a Mjolnir earring or pendent (the famous divine hammer) with a small svatiska on it.
If you have too much time to spend on the Internet and spend some of it researching Nazi occultism you will see Thule mentioned eventually. Then maybe it takes one or two "offended" people to post about how bad is NASA's choice of name on Twitter and now we're hearing about the complaint??
I also "learned" of a secret base in Antarctica where German submarines are hiding and they're still surviving there probably plotting to take over the world with a cloned Hitler 2.0. That's off-topic but I had to warn you about this lol.
OTOH, consider the random person who Googles "Ultima Thule" to find out more about the object, but has to wade through results on other subjects (especially after immediate interest wanes). Rick Santorum got the complement of the same problem. Language that allows homonyms is always going to have a problem with ambiguous meaning.
It is a "contact binary", not "contract".
This means two bodies that touch or attach to each other.
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shot with a potato camera thank you NADA
Well, it's a complicated world. If you need every name to be unique so that you can barf it into Google without any context, you're basically out of luck anyway: There is no Simple English version of the Ultima Thule Wikipedia page.
Oh my. I'm sure saying two spheres bumped together raises the shackles of flat-earthers. They would probably exclaim that it's actually two flat disks that sit next to each other. (rolls eyes)
Holy Crap! It's a Jibo!
And the Ultima Thule is the bestest of all of the racks.
Turbo codes on each block and reed solomon on each tbyte reduce the fanrastic number of errors, but at the cost of massively increasing data sent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Did they use Gimp?
If you'd asked me I would have said that Thule is the GateKeeper -- but then I looked it up to double check and find out the Gatekeeper is actually Zuul so I had no idea what it meant.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
None at all, as probes tend to travel at uniform speed in a uniform direction unless acted on by a force, and NASA's employees were in the office that day anyway.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If some person is, I don't give shit what they call themselves, they've nothing to do with justice, social or otherwise.
Secondly, none of the fuss was stirred up by anyone who actually believed it. It wss a troll, like any other, seeking to cause trouble. If anyone gets killed, well, the author will be that much happier.
You don't do that if you think you have a point. If you've evidence, you present it (they skip on that, a common trait of trolls) and you remain a dispassionate observer. You report the facts and only the facts.
If you don't, you're a "yellow paper" troll. And if they lined the oceanic trenches with such trolls, I wouldn't shed a tear. Except for the Hoff crab they squished.
None of the claims are factual, based remotely on justice or society, and are certainly not dispassionate.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The probe was already there and the NASA crew were already working.
Total spent: $0
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nothing in the article implied PC. It was all factless trolling, conspuracy theories and malicious troublemaking.
It wasn't political, never mind correct. It was a deliberate attempt to get NASA engineers attacked or killed for the sport.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The funniest part about your idiotic rant is that the list of "beliefs and approved things" is that essentially all nations that aren't gone today believe in most of those values, because those values have nothing to do with values. They have to do with being a successful nation.
So I guess I stand corrected. Even Lenin is a nazi to you, because Lenin built a more or less a successful state.
Still alone, aren't you? Just like on New Years?
Get the hell off of your daddy's 6-digit /. account and take your bullshit disney garbage with you!
But it wasn't even a nefarious "second meaning". It was a nefarious highly obscure meaning that no one in today's world knows of or uses. The article seems absurd in implying that the modern neo-Nazis still use the term.
Some writers are on the far fringe and should just be ignored, so maybe the problem is the Gizmodo editor that let the story through.
Ignoring is best. The worst response though is suddenly being full of outrage and declaring "that is how all feminists think!"
No you can only rape green babes on Alpha Centauri.
He could be a politician.
You have very low comprehension abilities if you think that was a rant, or that it applies to most countries around today.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That, or a US Air Force Base in NorthWestern Greenland.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yes, I'm sure that's it.