Nasa to wake up New Horizons spacecraft for voyage into mysterious Third Zone

telegraph.co.uk ^ | Sarah Knapton

[BenLurkin]

On September 11, the spacecraft will awaken for its 16 month journey to MU69, an ancient object which is thought to be one of the early building blocks of the Solar System.

The space rock had not even been discovered when the craft launched in 2006 and the flyby will be the most distant in the history of space exploration, a billion miles beyond Pluto, and four billion miles from Earth.

Recent observations of MU69 from the Hubble Space Telescope show it is probably two ‘binary’ objects or a pair of space rocks ‘stuck-together’ bodies which are each around 12 miles across.

...

After studying objects in The Kuiper Belt, the spacecraft will eventually leave the Solar System, a feat only achieved by Voyager so far.

And it is carrying the ashes of the scientist who discovered Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh died on January 17 1997, nine years and two days before New Horizon’s launch, but one of his final requests was for his ashes to be sent into space.

[Vermont Lt]

Ashes into space?

I can see the aliens opening up the craft and having them wonder if it’s a pyramid? Or if they sacrificed this being to insure a good result?

I wonder how much fuel was expended to get THAT into space?

[texas booster]

.

NEW HORIZONS EXPLORATION TARGET 2014 MU69 OCCULTS A STAR

On July 17, 2017 at 03:50 UTC, members of the New Horizons science team successfully observed Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 passing in front of a background star in the constellation Sagittarius.

The 24 frames in this animation were separated by 0.2 seconds apiece. In each 0.2 seconds, the shadow of 2014 MU69 passed 4 kilometers across Earth's surface. Observations like these will allow the team to constrain the size and position of the New Horizons mission's flyby target, improving the precision of their encounter planning.

This animation has been processed from the originally published version to reduce noise and align the star field.

The New Horizons team enjoyed strong support from Argentinian scientists, government officials, and locals, who went above and beyond to ensure mission success.

“I’ve been calling the people who helped us, our ‘twelfth player,’” [team member Mark] Buie said. “The Comodoro Rivadavia community came together and did some amazing things for us.” A major national highway was closed for two hours to keep car headlights away. Street lights were turned off to ensure absolute darkness. People like the Intendente or Mayor of the Comodoro parked trucks as wind breaks. Said Buie, “The local people were a major team player.”

“Planning for this complex astronomical deployment started just a few months ago and although the odds seem daunting -- like finding a needle in a haystack -- the team succeeded, thanks to the help of institutions like CONAE (Argentina's National Commission on Space Activities), and all the goodwill of the Argentinian people. This is another example of how space exploration brings out the best in us,” said New Horizons Program Executive Adriana Ocampo.

[BenLurkin]

Probably not all his ashes. Probably only a token amount.

[BenLurkin]

bttt

[SandRat]

This sounds like a story from Star Trek or Star Wars.

[texas booster]

To be clear - the star in the middle of the gif is blocked out by MU69 for one frame, and was visible only in the southern hemisphere.

Pretty neat.

[Moonman62]

What I find amazing is that we know the position of the star and the orbit of MU69 so well that the occultation was predicted far in advance.

[onedoug]

It’s a shame the object cannot be radiologically dated. I might expect some material out there to be a by product of an earlier stellar system.

[fella]

"might expect some material out there to be a by product of an earlier stellar system."

How does that fit into the constantly expanding universe model?

[Celerity]

We’ve been seeing more things that do NOT fit into the expansion model than things that do.

The Big Bang is starting to unravel. Red shift and Blue shift are things that are also affected by gravity.

our own gravity would give things a blue-shift as well. So everything would appear to be moving away from us.

[onedoug]

Where did the gold, nickel, iron and other even heavier elements inside our own earth come from if not from earlier stars?

In a universe ~15by old, I’m trying to understand why the earliest samples of stuff we’ve been able to date are no older than about 5 billion years.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Canister is described as 2 inches wide and 1.5 inches tall, containing a portion of his ashes. They may have meant half an inch tall. They may also have meant "interred", two "r's", only one "n". RIP.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I’m trying to understand why the earliest samples of stuff we’ve been able to date are no older than about 5 billion years.

Possibly that's because that's when the solar system formed, with heavier elements part of the debris of a nearby supernova. The shock wave from the supernova may have precipitated the formation of our solar system, and several of our neighboring stars. If we lived in a much older solar system, it might be different.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

What I find amazing is that we know the position of the star and the orbit of MU69 so well that the occultation was predicted far in advance.

Many stars positions are well mapped. They are guideposts, or reference marks, that essentially define celestial coordinates.

You can find the orbital elements and covariance for 486958 (2014 MU69) here.

It appears that the uncertainty in the size of the orbit is over 2.3876 AU, about 220 million miles! The orbital period is given as 296.44 years +/- 23.88 years. The orbit is based on a series of measurement taken in 2014, over 118 days. I suspect that the nature of the covariance is such that short term uncertainties in angular position cancel. We do not know a lot about the orbit, but we know were it is now, and pretty much how quickly it appears to moving across the sky. IOW it might be on bigger, faster orbit, or smaller slower orbit, the uncertainties are due to the relatively short time we have observed it, but we have enough observations to accurately predict its angular motion accurately for the next few years.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

[onedoug]

There are some other papers online which seem to bear this out from Wikipedia:

232Th is a primordial nuclide, having existed in its current form for over ten billion years; it was forged in the cores of dying stars through the r-process and scattered across the galaxy by supernovae.

Thus it seems that there are materials in this solar system older that the system itself.

Voila!

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I think our best bet for deep space exploration is by hijacking an asteroid. Land a nuclear powered probe on it that embeds deeply into the rock, then starts up an ion thruster engine with a big tank of xenon propellant.

As has been demonstrated, this could produce speeds in excess of 10km/sec. The body of the asteroid would take the brunt of any collisions in space. “In the wild”, some asteroids reach speeds of 25km/sec, so any momentum we could add to would be a bonus.

[BenLurkin]

Like!

[minnesota_bound]

Aliens will open the can and add water and reconstitute Clyde Tombaugh DNA and then grow a new Clyde Tombaugh.