Far Out
December 31, 2018 2:42 PM   Subscribe

Want to end or begin your year with a visit to the Kuiper Belt? Tonight, you can vicariously do so through NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it flies by minor planet 2014 MU69, making it the furthest ever visited by a spacecraft.

Follow the updates on this historic event using Emily Lakdawalla's Twitter list or read Phil Plait's primer on the event to learn more.

New Horizons previously
posted by subocoyne (42 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Despite the government shutdown, NASA TV will be covering this live. TMRO also have a live discussion happening here.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:36 PM on December 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


There's a great primer by Scott Manley that is also worth one's time!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 4:02 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I LOVE OUR ROBOT FRIENDS WHO ARE DOING EXPLORATION FOR US!
posted by hippybear at 4:11 PM on December 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


Sophia Gad-Nasr is tweeting from the party (on Earth.)
posted by homunculus at 4:24 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ultima Thule is 4 Billion miles from the Sun. New Horizons is traveling around 34,000 mph (54,000 kph) and will fly by it at 14 km/s. Don't blink!

Seriously, imo this will be one of the most remarkable achievements in human history. We've reached the Kuiper Belt, FFS! And most of the world seems to be oblivious to it.
posted by homunculus at 4:31 PM on December 31, 2018 [14 favorites]


Here's an image that gives a sense of UT's size: Ultima Thule (Estimated Mean Diameter ~30km) hovering over London England.
posted by homunculus at 4:32 PM on December 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


For some people at NASA, this experience is bittersweet.
posted by homunculus at 4:34 PM on December 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Everything about this is mind-blowing. I like to think I'm all old and jaded and cynical, but.
posted by clawsoon at 4:46 PM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Huh...discovered in 2014...8 years after launch. So we found something on the edge of the solar system and are doing a flyby only 4.5 years later. That's pretty unprecedented.
posted by sexyrobot at 5:00 PM on December 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


Thank you for the extra links! New Horizons really is an amazing project that is achieving a lot of firsts, and its set to do even more observations of Kuiper Belt objects in the future.
posted by subocoyne at 6:02 PM on December 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Ultima Thule is the new Yuggoth.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:07 PM on December 31, 2018


Huh...discovered in 2014...8 years after launch. So we found something on the edge of the solar system and are doing a flyby only 4.5 years later. That's pretty unprecedented.

We discovered 2014 MU69 because we wanted something to fly by. They searched for it using something like 200 hours of Hubble telescope time.
posted by rdr at 6:34 PM on December 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


... and that was only after other methods failed and they got desperate. They had to have the next target after Pluto well characterized before they got to Pluto. As I recall, they ended up getting director-discretion time on Hubble.

The Milky Way's galactic center is behind the NH flight path, from our perspective, and that makes it harder to find objects.
posted by intermod at 6:52 PM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


intermod: The Milky Way's galactic center is behind the NH flight path, from our perspective, and that makes it harder to find objects.

I assume this also makes it more likely for New Horizons to bump into an alien civilization in a couple of hundred million years.

(Or a rock. I know it's most likely to just bump into a rock.)
posted by clawsoon at 7:28 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


(given the proportion of there being something to there being nothing, the chances of it bumping into anything, whether rock or not, are really really small)
posted by hippybear at 8:21 PM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Good point. Does that make it more likely, then, to be found by a civilization, since a civilization can look into the sky and see things that don't bump into it?
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 PM on December 31, 2018


> The Milky Way's galactic center is behind the NH flight path, from our perspective, and that makes it harder to find objects.

Speaking of which, here's some astronomical trippiness: Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer? Black-hole computing:
Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies

posted by homunculus at 8:58 PM on December 31, 2018


Astrophysicist/Musician Brian May (of Queen fame) is on NASA TV. He's about to debut a new song he's written about New Horizons.
posted by homunculus at 9:01 PM on December 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Two minute countdown!
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:31 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


(Or a rock. I know it's most likely to just bump into a rock.)

Knowing the way the universe works, it'll be head-on into an alien probe coming our way.
posted by Guy Smiley at 9:39 PM on December 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


That's pretty damned unprecedented
posted by oheso at 9:43 PM on December 31, 2018


All systems nominal! It survived! And the recorders are full!

Well done that team. Sensational work.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:43 AM on January 1, 2019 [7 favorites]


and now we wait for pictures
posted by kokaku at 7:49 AM on January 1, 2019


All systems nominal!

I will never ever get tired of these ultra-nerdy checklist readoffs. BTW for any MeFites just coming in, the New Horizons team will be doing a live press conference at 11:30 am Eastern.
posted by martin q blank at 7:50 AM on January 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


Does that make it more likely, then, to be found by a civilization, since a civilization can look into the sky and see things that don't bump into it?

Yes, but I suspect that increase in likelihood is unlikely to yield any positive results because the chances of it passing close enough by any object is very small, let alone an object inhabited by a civilization that can look out into space and identify things.

Space is big, like really really big. And it's mostly empty.

But yes, it is more likely to be found if something is looking for it than if nothing is. By whatever tiny factor that might be.
posted by hippybear at 7:50 PM on January 1, 2019


Space is big, like really really big. And it's mostly empty.

Fer sure! To put it in perspective, stars (approx 1 million miles across on average) are like ping pong balls in major cities. So, like, a ping pong ball in NYC, one in L.A., maybe one in Atlanta, except that it's two...most stars are double stars.
The only things in space that tend to run into each other (well, except for debris in forming solar systems) are galaxies. Galaxies (approx 50,000-100,000 light years across) are like dinner plates flying around in a room and run into each other all the time, just slowly, because huge distances and the speed of light limit. (The milky way and andromeda (2 million ly away) are on a collision course. It'll happen in approx a billion years) And when galaxies collide their stars don't even run into each other, because they are so far apart.
Stars do tend to collide in globular clusters though, or, well, they get wound up into each other over time (keyword: blue stragglers). And you'd think that the resulting explosion would be massive, but nope, being basically liquid, star collisions are more of a 'bloop' than a 'bang'
Ok, now I'm bored, I wanna see pictuuures!
posted by sexyrobot at 9:09 PM on January 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


If New Horizons doesn't bump into anything, how likely is it to end up in orbit either around a star or around the center of the galaxy?
posted by clawsoon at 4:12 AM on January 2, 2019


Well, without slowing down (ie with a huge tank of fuel that it doesn't have) it's unlikely to enter orbit around a star or planet. Likelier scenarios are crashing or flying past in a hyperbola. As far as orbiting the center of the galaxy, it (like our entire solar system and the vast majority of everything that can be seen with the naked eye) already does. Changing that would possibly require more fuel than the earth contains, or at least a significant fraction of it.
posted by sexyrobot at 4:30 AM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


and now we wait for pictures

Apparently there's so much data, it'll be streaming back for the next 2 years!

I love living in the 21st Century! SOMETIMES. This is one of those times.
posted by mikelieman at 5:43 AM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yesterday they released a composite image constructed from three very pixelated images of the rotating MU69* (article at NASA).

* --- TIL that Ultima Thule has Nazi connotations, so hopefully they'll be re-naming it Peanut or something soon.
posted by pjenks at 8:50 AM on January 2, 2019 [4 favorites]


And clearer images will be revealed today!
@JHUAPL The clearest images and first science results we have of #UltimaThule - the farthest object ever explored by spacecraft - from the @NASANewHorizons flyby. Don't miss the unveiling TODAY at 2pm ET.
posted by pjenks at 9:06 AM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


Here's the newest image, with a reflectivity profile (it's as reflective as potting soil). Some info and screenshots from the press conference:
  • First directly observed contact binary... two separate objects joined
  • 15h rotation period
  • "bi-lobate comet"
  • It's red!
  • And a newer, even better resolution image
posted by pjenks at 11:16 AM on January 2, 2019 [2 favorites]




  • Volume ratio of two lobes is 3:1.
  • Gravitational forces alone are enough to hold them together, without any need for contact forces.
  • First primordial contact binary. Supports theory that all comets are just screwed-up (by close encounters with Sun) accretion binaries.
  • Surface seems dominated by slow accretion processes rather than high-velocity cratering (unclear if there are craters or not... need the views from behind to determine)
posted by pjenks at 11:35 AM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


  • These images were taken at 50,000 km, an hour before closest approach.
  • Upcoming images (from the fly-by, rather than these first head-on images) will have higher resolutions (35m/pixel vs. 140m/pixel now), and better lighting to observe shadows
  • They currently have 3-4 images of hundreds incoming.
  • New Horizons is a very healthy satellite (not yet using any back-up systems) and has power to go for another 15 years or more. They will accept proposals this summer for new potential visits and could perform a search for new visits before exiting the Kuiper belt in a decade.
posted by pjenks at 11:48 AM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


They've made a little model of the contact binary... as they say, it has "no neck".
posted by pjenks at 11:52 AM on January 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


I've gushed about the occultation campaign before on MeFi, so I loved that they put together this image, showing how great the data from that was.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:18 PM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


In other news: @lorengrush: "So within the next few hours, it looks like China may land on the far side of the Moon. Want to know what they're up to up there?"
posted by homunculus at 2:58 PM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


They've made a little model of the contact binary... as they say, it has "no neck".

Should've gone with "no fucking neck".
posted by Guy Smiley at 9:25 PM on January 2, 2019


Weird...it looks almost exactly like BB-8 from the Star Wars.
posted by sexyrobot at 12:42 AM on January 3, 2019


Moo!
posted by homunculus at 8:04 AM on January 3, 2019 [4 favorites]


Weird...it looks almost exactly like BB-8 from the Star Wars.

Indeed!
posted by homunculus at 8:06 AM on January 3, 2019


« Older 2018: Escalation   |   MMVIII Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments