Where is Ultima Thule? BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains
Where is Ultima Thule? BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains
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.
That explains the Brian May music video about it that popped up on the Queen official music video channel today on YouTube.
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.
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.
