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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??!!!
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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?
Here's a better article, that doesn't prattle about Nazis: http://www.astronomy.com/news/...
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.