The New Horizons team is preparing for their spacecraft to fly by 2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule) on Jan. 1, 2019. At the current planned flyby distance, the spacecraft's instruments will take higher resolution imagery of the object(s) than what was seen at Pluto:
Because Ultima is small — probably just 25 km (16 miles) or so in diameter — it will remain just a point of light to New Horizons until about 2 days before the close flyby. However, in the final hours around closest approach, New Horizons will be able to map Ultima at higher resolutions than we achieved at Pluto, because we will fly by Ultima at a much closer range than we did at Pluto
We will obtain geologic mapping resolutions as high as 35 meters (110 feet) per pixel using LORRI. By comparison, our highest resolution Pluto mapping was about 80 meters (260 feet) per pixel.
With the Ralph imager, we also plan to acquire color images of Ultima with resolutions as high as 330 meters (0.2 miles) per pixel, and composition mapping at a resolution of 1.8 km (1.1 miles) per pixel. Stereo imaging made on approach will map the surface topography of Ultima at about 80 meters (260 feet) per pixel.The first detailed imagery of Ultima will be downlinked to Earth once the spacecraft has completed its main flyby objectives late on January 1st, and will be released to the public after processing and image analysis on January 2nd. More images, as well as spectra and other data sets, will be downlinked on January 2nd, 3rd, and 4th — so get ready to learn a lot about Ultima in the first week of the new year! Then the spacecraft will slip behind the Sun as seen from Earth and image transmissions will cease for 5 days until the spacecraft reappears and can resume data transmissions.
The total data volume collected on the Ultima flyby will be close to 50 gigabits. Because New Horizons is so far from Earth, about 6 billion km (4 billion miles), its data transmission speed is now only about 1,000 bits per second. This limitation, and the fact that we share NASA's Deep Space Network of tracking and communication antennas with over a dozen other NASA missions, means that it will take 20 months or more, until late in 2020, to send all of the data about Ultima and its environment back to Earth.
The team has until Dec. 16 to determine if there are any hazards (such as dust or satellites) that will necessitate changing the closest approach distance from 3,500 km to 10,000 km.
[According to the Deep Space Networkpage, at the time of this writing, the New Horizons probe is at a distance of 6.56 billion km with a round-trip light time of 12.16 hours. We're gonna need some faster light! --Ed.]
See also: Why NASA chose Senegal to observe a frozen world beyond Pluto
Previously: One Last Stellar Occultation of 2014 MU69 to be Observed Before Jan. 1 New Horizons Flyby
New Horizons Spacecraft Approaches 2014 MU69; OSIRIS-REx Nears 101955 Bennu
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NASA's New Horizons team will again attempt observations of a stellar occultation of 2014 MU69, provisionally nicknamed Ultima Thule. Previous observations made when the object passed in front of a background star suggested that it was a contact binary and may have a small moon:
The goal is to learn as much as possible about 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, which New Horizons will zoom past on Jan. 1, 2019. "This occultation will give us hints about what to expect at Ultima Thule and help us refine our flyby plans," New Horizons occultation-event leader Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
This is not the mission team's first shadow rodeo. Last summer, scientists traveled to Argentina and South Africa for occultation observations; the Argentina crew hit the jackpot, gathering data that helped set the planned flyby distance at 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers).
[...] Ultima Thule lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto, which New Horizons famously flew by in July 2015. Scientists think Ultima Thule is about 20 miles (32 km) across if it's a single object; if it's two bodies, each component is probably 9 miles to 12 miles (15 to 21 km) long.
An occultation was used to determine that the dwarf planet Haumea may have a ring system in addition to its two known moons.
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."
New Horizons: Nasa probe survives flyby of Ultima Thule
The US space agency's New Horizons probe has made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of the icy world known as Ultima Thule.
The encounter occurred some 6.5bn km (4bn miles) away, making it the most distant ever exploration of an object in our Solar System.
New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass.
It will now send these home over the coming months.
[...] Even just the final picture released from the approach phase to the flyby contained tantalising information. Ultima appears in it as just a blob, but immediately it has allowed researchers to refine their estimate of the object's size - about 35km by 15km.
It should be become clear within the next day or two whether or not 2014 MU69 is double-lobed or a binary object.
Additionally, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory self-reports:
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtags #UltimaThule, #UltimaFlyby and #askNewHorizons to join the conversation. Live updates and links to mission information are also available on http://pluto.jhuapl.edu and www.nasa.gov.
Also at: Ars Technica, The New York Times, ScienceNews, and phys.org.
Previously: Final Planning for the New Horizons Flyby of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule) Underway
New Horizons' Newest and Best-Yet View of Ultima Thule
Obtained with the wide-angle Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) component of New Horizons' Ralph instrument, this image was taken when the KBO was 4,200 miles (6,700 kilometers) from the spacecraft, at 05:26 UT (12:26 a.m. EST) on Jan. 1 – just seven minutes before closest approach. With an original resolution of 440 feet (135 meters) per pixel, the image was stored in the spacecraft's data memory and transmitted to Earth on Jan. 18-19. Scientists then sharpened the image to enhance fine detail. (This process – known as deconvolution – also amplifies the graininess of the image when viewed at high contrast.)
The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top. These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles (0.7 kilometers) in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles (7 kilometers) across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as "collapse pits" or the ancient venting of volatile materials.
MVIC (Ralph) has a lower resolution than LORRI, which should have taken its best images at around 30-35 meters per pixel.
Also at Spaceflight Now, BBC, and TechCrunch.
Previously: Final Planning for the New Horizons Flyby of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule) Underway
New Horizons Survives Flyby, Begins Sending Back Data
New Images Reveal Structure, Color, and Features of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule)
Animation Shows Rotation of 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
One interesting thing about TFA is that the spacecraft is closing at 1,000,000 miles per day. That works out to 41 and 2/3 thousands (41666.66667) miles per hour or 11.5 miles per second. So at closest approach point it will speed by it in less than two seconds edge-to-edge. (Yeah, it's more complicated than that but there's only so far I have time to run with this...) Elsewhere I saw that it's escape speed as just a piddling 38,000 mph.
At any rate, color imaging of a twenty mile object from over two thousand miles away at 11+ miles per second with resolutions measured as fractions of miles per pixel. That's pretty darn impressive!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:53PM
True I guess, but since the closest approach is a planned 3,500 km (~2,175 miles), it will already be snapping away great photos from a distance of 5k, 10k km, etc. Helped by the fact that the planned approach is closer than the distance that New Horizons passed by Pluto (12,500 km). So I guess for up to 15 minutes (~8 minutes before and after closest approach), all of the imagery taken will be of a higher resolution than that of Pluto. It's less than that due to the movement of 2014 MU69, but you get the idea.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @01:45AM (1 child)
pack a cubesat on the end of a bullet. Fire it backwards as you are passing and then the cubesat has more time for pictures or science analysis
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @06:11AM
Most bullets travel at less than a mile per second.