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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."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday August 31 2018, @05:54AM
That's about 1.1AU in more relatable terms
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jelizondo on Friday August 31 2018, @06:07AM (6 children)
A story not known, outside some very deep occult circles, is the level of civilization attained by dinosaurs.
In actual fact they had progressed to the Space Era before they were destroyed by the Chicxulub [wikipedia.org] asteroid impact. The fact that the asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs is currently disputed but the existence of the impact crater and its age are not questioned.
It happened that a deep space probe was sent to study asteroids but in their haste the dinosaurs forgot about orbital perturbations. The probe was sent, perturbed the asteroid and a few years later bam! the asteroid hit the Earth, killing them all.
This knowledge is imparted to the lay because Bennu is an orbit that could indeed hit the Earth and the probe’s approach could have catastrophic effects. You have been warned.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:29AM (2 children)
My college roommate used to play video games all day. One was a civ type game that allowed you to play various species. I've always wondered if sentience had developed earlier on Earth, and if it did, would a technological civilization from a hundred million years ago be visible in the geological record. The answer is no, from what little I've read on the subject. But it's an interesting question.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:31AM
PS, we were physics majors so
is one of the dumber things that I've read.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday August 31 2018, @03:19PM
Civ type game that allowed you to play various species is actually a fairly small group of games. I'm going with, Master of Magic, or perhaps one of the Age of Wonders series of games (spiritual successor to Master of Magic). Unless he was actually just playing a Civ Mod. It could be a really vague statement on your part and you actually meant something like Master of Orion.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @05:18PM (2 children)
You've been reading Cixin Liu?
(Score: 1) by jelizondo on Friday August 31 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
Indeed. Actually I am reading again "The Three Body Problem" because its been a while since I read it for the first time and wanted to have it fresh in my mind for the first book review we plan for next month. (tomorrow?)
Of course the post was an attempt at a joke...
Cheers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 01 2018, @01:42AM
Yeah, I've pulled Three Body out to read again. Like a couple other extra-large stories, once finishing it, coming back to the beginning seems alien.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday August 31 2018, @02:10PM (4 children)
Is 12:33 a.m. EST when it's at its closest approach or when we get to see it, given lightspeed delays? If we get to see it then, it may be worth staying up all night for new year's.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday August 31 2018, @02:11PM
Happy New Horizons!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @03:30PM (2 children)
It is the moment the spacecraft passes the object(s). Getting images will probably take days for the initial ones and months for the entire dataset, since it is transmitting at about 1 Kbps, give or take. However, we might get some images in the weeks leading up to the flyby, possibly revealing whether it is a "contact binary", or a normal binary consisting of two objects orbiting each other.
Another possibility is that New Horizons smashes into some debris and is destroyed!
-t
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
They worried about that at Pluto, and so had the probe send one decent-quality photo roughly a day before closest encounter so that at least they'd have a nice souvenir even if the probe got destroyed by debris orbiting Pluto.
However, the new object may be too small to do the same thing. By the time the probe is close enough to take a good snapshot, it won't have time to broadcast the image before closest approach. Unlike the Voyager probes, New Horizons cannot send high-res data to Earth while probing. It was a cost-saving decision.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 31 2018, @05:45PM
They have until mid-December to change course.
MU69 could have scattered material all over the place if two lobes smashed into each other. We have also seen minor/dwarf planets (Haumea, Chariklo, Chiron) with ring systems.
That said, the system's diameter is in the ballpark of 40 km and New Horizons will approach as close at 3,500 km. The flyby may be perfectly safe.
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