Posted on 12/27/2018 8:41:12 AM PST by BenLurkin
This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood.
The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it’s been traveling through space for the last 13 years. You may remember this famous bot: it was the first human-made object to ever visit Pluto in the summer of 2015. Ever since that flyby, New Horizons has been plunging farther into the Solar System. Three years later, it’s ready to meet up with another faraway target, a rock nicknamed Ultima Thule located 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. That’s 4.1 billion miles from Earth.
It’s a tiny frigid object about the size of New York City, orbiting in an area of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. This region of space, located beyond the orbit of Neptune, is filled with possibly millions of small frozen objects. It’s a bit like a super distant Asteroid Belt. Except the bodies in the Kuiper Belt are thought to be incredibly primitive — leftover remnants from the birth of the Solar System. When the planets first formed 4.5 billion years ago, the materials in the Kuiper Belt region didn’t join together to form new worlds but instead remained as tiny fragments.
Kuiper Belt objects are incredibly cold — just 35 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. At this temperature, the objects don’t change very much on the surface. They’ve essentially been frozen in time over billions of years.
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
Huge mantatee? I wasn’t aware there were living organisms on the probe. :-)
Kuiper Belt objects are incredibly cold — just 35 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. At this temperature, the objects don’t change very much on the surface. They’ve essentially been frozen in time over billions of years.
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They thought the same about Pluto, but it turned out to be surprisingly active.
“Kirk unit. V’ger requires the information.”
It may just be me but I translate 'into' as meaning to approach the interior which New Horizons is not doing. Better word choice might be to say 'progressing further out of the Solar System.'
On a different 'Outer Space' note, today is the 50th Anniversary of the RETURN of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to exit Earth's gravity and orbit the Moon! If you look up 1968 history for the USofA, it was a bad year. Assassinations of Bobby Kennedy & Martin Luther King, riots in multiple major cities, escalation of troops and war in Vietnam, etc. Yet, to end that year with this very successful mission, that was a great ending!
I don’t consider it quibbling. I consider the articles about New Horizons to be incredibly ignorant, at best. Why they can’t just focus on the merits of New Horizon, I don’t know.
The first humans to leave the protection of the Van Allen Belt.
Mention VAB to millennials fawning over the ISS vs. a manned mission to Mars and they look like a deer in the headlights. Then they stomp away angry. Truth hurts. Oddly, same thing happens with normally-intelligent others as well.
I think at 4.5 billion years-old they’d have named it Helen Thomas instead of Ultima Thule.
But not the last. Of course, the VABS only protect against particle radiation - the astronauts in the ISS get exactly as much Gamma and X-Ray radiation as if they were in open space.
Also, research into the protection of satellites in the VABs back in the 60s showed that aluminium at an areal density 5g/cm2 reduced annual radiation dose from 3,000,000 REM to 550 REM. Pretty good, eh? The Apollo CM hull was the equivalent of around 7g/cm2 so was even better.
Mention any of this to Millenials or Moon Landing Deniers, though and they haven't a clue.
One thing that is absolutely not appreciated is the incredible risks those men took on that mission (actually all of them - Project Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo).
So much was unknown; so much was untried.
The men involved in the space program were of the highest caliber in American history.
Hope New Horizons can say hi to Brian Blessed on Ultima Thule. (Space 1999 reference)
It’s a Rock Jim.
Hi.
“”No, Kenny, not Uma Thurman!””
What!? I thought they were talking about Uma.
I was wondering how she got out there.
5.56mm
All of the technology and labor that has gone into the NH mission must have racked up quite a bill - so what was the cost of this epic voyage?
$720 million, so far. That’s $72 million per year in flight.
For this we found out that Pluto is a frozen mass. The next object in line will most likely be a frozen mass.
How does this move the Human race forward even one inch?
They were the first to orbit the moon, true enough, but they didn't "exit earth's gravity" because earth's gravity is what keeps the moon in orbit. If you want to be completely accurate, men have never left earth orbit ... even while orbiting the moon, they were still in earth orbit, because the moon is.
Since the mass of both a space craft and a human is much smaller than the mass of the moon, while the moon is orbiting the earth, the space craft doesn’t observe any noticable effect of earths gravity while approaching the moon, espacially not enough to orbit the earth.
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