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takyon writes:

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has imaged 2014 MU₆₉, nicknamed Ultima Thule, from about 172 million kilometers away:

Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA's Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team's first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.

[...] This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima's orbit.

Meanwhile, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is approaching 101955 Bennu, and has taken a series of images from a distance of about 2.2 million kilometers:

After arrival at Bennu, the spacecraft will spend the first month performing flybys of Bennu's north pole, equator and south pole, at distances ranging between 11.8 and 4.4 miles (19 and 7 km) from the asteroid. These maneuvers will allow for the first direct measurement of Bennu's mass as well as close-up observations of the surface. These trajectories will also provide the mission's navigation team with experience navigating near the asteroid.

"Bennu's low gravity provides a unique challenge for the mission," said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "At roughly 0.3 miles [500 meters] in diameter, Bennu will be the smallest object that any spacecraft has ever orbited."

Original Submission

1. "takyon" - https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/
2. "2014 MU69" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69
3. "about 172 million kilometers away" - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ultima-in-view-nasa-s-new-horizons-makes-first-detection-of-kuiper-belt-flyby-target
4. "101955 Bennu" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101955_Bennu
5. "a series of images" - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasas-osiris-rex-begins-asteroid-operations-campaign
6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=28724

printed from SoylentNews, New Horizons Spacecraft Approaches 2014 MU69; OSIRIS-REx Nears 101955 Bennu on 2024-04-29 06:12:21