SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the you-think-you-have-challenges-with-debugging? dept.
Recently, the New Horizons spacecraft took the furthest images ever made from Earth. But they weren't of Earth. That could change in 2019:
Sometime after January 2019, New Horizons, the spacecraft that brought us photos of the heart-shaped terrain on Pluto, will turn back toward Earth. The probe's camera, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI for short, will start snapping away. Nearly three decades after the original, humanity will get another "Pale Blue Dot."
"We've been talking about it for years," says Andy Cheng of the plan to take another 'Pale Blue Dot' image. Cheng is a scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and the principal investigator for LORRI.
It's a risky move. The attempt requires pointing LORRI close enough to the sun so that objects in the darkness are illuminated, but not so close that sunlight damages or destroys the camera. "But we're going to do it anyway, for the same reason as before," Cheng says. "It's just such a great thing to try."
The photo shoot will take considerable coordination. "All activities on the spacecraft need to be choreographed in elaborate detail and then checked and checked again," Cheng says. "Taking a LORRI image involves more than just LORRI—the spacecraft needs to point the camera in the right direction, lorri needs to be operated, the image data needs to be put in the right place and then accessed and transmitted to Earth, which requires more maneuvers of the spacecraft, all of which needs to happen on a spacecraft almost 4 billion miles away."
New Horizons will fly by 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. It will take about 18 months to send back all the data from the flyby.
Related: Occultations of New Horizons' Next Target (2014 MU69) Observed
New Horizons Target 2014 MU69 May be a "Contact Binary"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by b0ru on Wednesday February 14 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
Considering our observations of other star systems, and our discovery of so many exoplanets, it might not be the farthest image of our planet, the Earth, or even close!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 14 2018, @03:48PM
If you want to do SETI the interesting way, you broadcast one of those low res dot photos along with "here's a picture of our home, any of you losers able to do better astrophotography than us? I think not, LOL." Now if the Cylons or Necrons or Klingons or whatever transmit back something with Google Maps resolution, then yeah we're pretty well screwed, but that's getting off point, the point is we could troll alien civilizations into talking to us.
Isn't going to translate cross culturally as well as a nice astrophotography troll.
Anyway, my point is that trolling as a SETI strategy is vastly underrated.