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posted by martyb on Saturday April 15 2017, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the perchance-to-dream? dept.

NASA's New Horizons probe has measured the "cosmic optical background" using its LORRI instrument:

Images taken by NASA's New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto, and now the Kuiper Belt, have given scientists an unexpected tool for measuring the brightness of all the galaxies in the universe, said a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher in a paper published this week in Nature Communications.

[...] "This result shows some of the promise of doing astronomy from the outer solar system," Zemcov said. "What we're seeing is that the optical background is completely consistent with the light from galaxies and we don't see a need for a lot of extra brightness; whereas previous measurements from near the Earth need a lot of extra brightness. The study is proof that this kind of measurement is possible from the outer solar system, and that LORRI is capable of doing it." Spacecraft in the outer solar system give scientists virtual front-row seats for observing the cosmic optical background. The faint light from distant galaxies is hard to see from the inner solar system because it is polluted by the brightness of sunlight reflected off interplanetary dust in the inner solar system.

New Horizons was put into hibernation mode on April 7th. The spacecraft is more than half-way to its next destination, 2014 MU69, which it will reach around January 1st, 2019:

Measurement of the cosmic optical background using the long range reconnaissance imager on New Horizons (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15003) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:13PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:13PM (#494548) Journal

    My hypothesis is that they cannot really go to space, and same applies for the other space agencies.

    So how did all the satellites get into space? They put the the satellite on earth and prayed to god, and then god put the satellites into orbit? Or is it the aliens who secretly visit out planet and put our satellites in orbit in exchange to being allowed to take anal probes of unsuspecting people?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:18AM (#494667)

    I think GP believes (or more likely, is a troll pretending to believe) the satellites didn't go into space. All the pictures "from space" are from that top-secret soundstage where they faked the moon landings, and anyone who claims to have a device that uses satellites to tell them their location is really just using their good sense of direction and is in on the conspiracy!