Where is Ultima Thule? BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains
Posted on 01/01/2019 10:15:21 PM PST by SunkenCiv
New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass.
It will now send these home over the coming months.
The radio message from the robotic craft was picked up by one of Nasa's big antennas, in Madrid, Spain.
It had taken fully six hours and eight minutes [for the signal] to traverse the great expanse of space between Ultima and Earth...
Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland greeted the reception of the signal with cheers and applause.
This first radio message contained only engineering information on the status of the spacecraft, but it included confirmation that New Horizons executed its autonomous flyby observations as instructed and that the probe's onboard memory was full...
A later downlink on Tuesday will see some choice images returned to give scientists and the public a taster of what New Horizons saw through its cameras.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Where is Ultima Thule? BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains
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Thanks.
NASA gets a lot of well deserved criticism, but their space probes and the knowledge they get from them is still generations ahead of any other country. Aerobraking, gravity assisted speed and direction adjustments, navigation in deep space, were science fiction only a couple of decades ago. Now NASA is so experienced at it, these are almost routine.
Each one of those planetary missions builds on what has been done before, but are essentially one-offs, and the work to figure out the mission, design it, and build it, takes a very long time, and a major bite of years out of the scientific careers of those responsible. My hat's off to 'em. Contrast that to *any* politician, I dare ya. ;^)
That explains the Brian May music video about it that popped up on the Queen official music video channel today on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Jm5POCAj8
Can’t watch it from here — does he bash President Trump?
Queen’s Brian May Comes Out For The Protection of Comets from Vandalism
Brian May of Queen’s blog | 6/28/2005 | B.M.
Posted on 06/29/2005 10:14:55 PM PDT by lainie
http://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1433639/posts
Jack FM turkey ‘cook or save’ vote slammed by Brian May [Queen guitarist]
BBC | December 11, 2014 | unattributed
Posted on 12/14/2014 8:59:23 AM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3237088/posts
Brian May named university chancellor
AP/Yahoo! | 11/19/07
Posted on 11/19/2007 10:45:12 PM PST by Slings and Arrows
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1928228/posts
At least the music video is bashing-free. Good music though.
Looking forward to closer, clearer pix coming in. They won’t be nearly as mind-blowing as Pluto was but they’ll be exciting nonetheless.
That little probe has been a champ!
I wouldn’t mind seeing close-ups of Una Thurman. She was great in “Kill Bill, I & II”.
The fungi of yuggoth didn’t colonize it, nor did a bayakee nest on it.
It will now send these home over the coming months.
they mean over the coming years - 4 to be exact.
the music... I’m not a big fan of. It seems contrived and repetitive. It’s flat with no character. I expected more of Brian May. Like, “Here, make a song out of this...” and he took phrases out of the executive summary for the lyrics.
After some of them pictures, I’d reckon I’d call it Ultima Stool.
Apparently the anti-spacecraft defenses weren’t as powerful as supposed.
According to the Wiki, when this thing was only as far away as Pluto, it could transmit data to earth as fast as 1 kilobit per second.
Remember the once-ubiquitous Hayes 1200-baud Smart Modem? For making ‘POTS’ (dial-up) connections to a BBS? This is about that slow. It needed 15 months to transmit the 6.25 gigabytes of data collected in the fly-by of Pluto.
Now it’s even slower, on account of it’s further away. But it’s got nothing better to do for the next ... like ...gazillion years.
Not only the tech but the math to compute these missions is amazing for someone like me who is totally Calculus challenged.
She's a mighty plain girl, but early in her career she went topless in a scene in "Dangerous Liaisons".
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