Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/01/nasa-reaches-the-farthest-targ.html
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116 years ago, the first airplane took flight, and now we’ve sent a probe 4 billion million miles (and counting) from the sun. We are clever monkeys.
Now we just have to fix things down here.
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It’s not very Ultima now, is it?
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So, presumably NASA didn’t just punt NH out into the void hoping to find something, yet NH only spotted Ultima for the first time in August. My question is; when and how was Ultima first sensed?
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You just wait until they find that Richard Garriott has built a castle on that thing.
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I know right? I was talking to my buddy Isaac the other day. The dude is odd. Obsessed with numbers. Scribbling on scraps of paper and just staring into space. He was telling me he thought he was getting somewhere with it and showed me a bunch of lines under a curve. I told him to get a life. There are real problems that need to be solved. He looked at me for a second and said, “Man, you have a point. I’m gonna stop with this nonsense and go feed people at the soup kitchen for the rest of my life.” I feel like I made a contribution that day.
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first pictures tomorrow (2PM Eastern) and the next day
then solar interference will prevent communication for a few days.
rest of the data will trickle down, getting progressively more detailed, through march…
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That’s kind of a cool story . They used the Hubble to look for something interesting, and then addted that to the NH mission profile.
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Ultima Thule was first spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014.
Once New Horizons passed its primary target of Pluto a few years ago, it was decided to continue the mission and get a close look at something else way out there and Ultima Thule just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Hubble has way better resolution than the cameras aboard New Horizons so while the nerds at NASA knew where Ultima Thule was, and could aim the spacecraft towards it remotely, New Horizons’ cameras could not themselves pick out the target until they were well on their way towards it.
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I’m glad you got my point. There is an ever so slight scolding in your comment. I thought it deserved an answer. You might not have intended it that way, but it’s not as easy to tell as you apparently think. It, the idea that resources have to be preserved and dedicated to my particular issue to the exclusion of other issues, is out there and repeated with some frequency. I feel a need, still, to point out that there are armies of people out there working on solving our earthbound problems. Even at NASA.
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I am curious what the data rate is from that far out, is it even faster than an ancient 300 baud modem?
update: apparently it does 1000bps at pluto, so probably even slower than that now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Telecommunications_and_data_handling
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The simplest form of artificial gravity.
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I should have said; “And we need to clean things up down here too”
I think it’s AMAAAAAZING what we have achieved in space science over the last 100 odd years; we ARE clever monkeys!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut (or ballerina), or astronaut ballerina
So I’m not one those people who say “What’s the point of going to outer space? What good does it do us?”
We can science the shit out of ALL the shit!
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Yes, the improvements in Stick TechnologyTM have been quite staggering.
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Astronaut ballerinas would be so cool.
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I once did makeup for a fashion show inside a giant Valentina Tereshkova spacesuit; no ballerinas though. That would have been ace.
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Interesting: Brian May, the guitarist for the legendary rock band Queen and an astrophysicist, is also a participating scientist in the New Horizons mission…He was also inspired to release a new song celebrating New Horizons on New Year’s Day.
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