Posted on 01/02/2019 1:24:00 PM PST by Simon Green
Humanity has captured its first clear look at an object in the faraway Kuiper Belt.
NASA revealed the first images and science data from this week's historic flyby in a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Far from the blurry 'bowling pin' we saw with New Horizons' first look when it beamed its signal home early morning on January 1, the new images reveal Ultima Thule is snowman-shaped red world with two distinct lobes - one stacked atop the other.
This arrangement is what's known as a contact binary, the experts say – and, it’s now the first a spacecraft has ever explored.
Photographing Ultima Thule – and traveling more than four billion miles through space to get there – is a ‘technical success beyond anything ever attempted before in spaceflight,’ Principal Investigator Alan Stern said in a press conference Wednesday.
'It's really only the size of Washington D.C., and about as reflective as garden variety dirt,' Stern explained, noting that the object wasn't even known to the world prior to the summer of 2014.
'We were ultimately chasing it down in the dark at 32,000 miles per hour.'
The best images of the new batch were captured when New Horizons was about 17,000 miles (27, 000 kilometers) from Ultima Thule.
And, the pictures will only get better from here.
The scientists say the two lobes of Ultima Thule came together in a 'gentle' accretion process, with two objects bound together by each other's gravity.
The primitive world was 'born' this way, and did not evolve or deform through external processes to take on the strange shape, the team explains.
'New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system,'said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and Geophysics team lead.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Simon,
They are lying to us.
We have not solved the problem of getting through the Van Allen radiation belts that kill living beings.
We have not solved the problem of getting through the thermosphere whose temperatures are significantly higher than needed to melt the metals in the spacecraft.
So, no go.
This is all CGI.
Quit lying.
Sure it is. You have to run around it lengthwise. Of course, once you hit the end and try to make the turn you might fly off into space.
Couple pieces of coal and a carrot and you’d have something.
Interesting. The ring of more reflective material where the two pieces join is striking. Do they grind on each other?
Very cool stuff. America has shown its might again.
I think we are still getting images from the Voyagers 1 and 2. I checked on them on NASA web site, they are almost to interstellar space and we are still getting data from them.
NorthMountain,
Take it up with NASA. They are the ones who said it.
Here is the link where NASA admits to this barrier:
https://youtu.be/4O5dPsu66Kw?t=164
"We" knew a long time ago how to make electronics radiation-hard. The Van Allen belts were never the big deal you make them out to be. How do you think they were discovered?
Quit Lying.
Do you know the difference between heat and temperature? Do you know there IS a difference between heat and temperature?
Quit lying.
New Horizons is unmanned. You know that, right?
Quit lying.
No more images from the Voyagers. Still getting radiation and magnetometer data from them.
‘It’s really only the size of Washington D.C....’
And just as useless.
Hmmmm, it could be argued that we learned some science from Ultima.
Don’t even consider associating “science” with the District of Cretins.
“Very cool stuff. America has shown its might again.”
I dunno, the Clintons undoubted sold any technology associated with this to the Chinese years ago. (And I’m not kidding.)
NorthMountain,
Your response is typical. You can’t handle the truth, so you ignore it and substitute an ad hominem attack.
If anything, you should find it suspicious that a NASA engineer, in a NASA produced video, is making a recent claim that we can’t yet go through the Van Allen radiation belts. You should be questioning NASA, not me.
Here is a sample letter for you to send to NASA:
Dear NASA People,
How did the Apollo astronauts get through the Van Allen radiation belts back in the 1960s and return with live astronauts and electronics intact? In your video, you clearly stated that we can’t do that yet. So, tell me, how did we do that back then?
Quit lying.
“We” knew a long time ago how to make electronics radiation-hard. The Van Allen belts were never the big deal you make them out to be. How do you think they were discovered?
Quit Lying.
Do you know the difference between heat and temperature? Do you know there IS a difference between heat and temperature?
Quit lying.
New Horizons is unmanned. You know that, right?
Quit lying.
A youtube video! We know those are never bogus.
In the end, it seemed that these tactics worked; the on-board dose counters for the Apollo missions registered average radiation doses to the skin of the astronauts of 0.38 rad. This is about the same radiation dose as getting two CT scans of your head, or half the dose of a single chest CT scan; not too bad, though not something you should do every week.
NorthMountain,
Again, a typical response.
You don’t answer the challenge with an intelligent response. You just repeat (chant, if you will) what you said earlier.
So, your response is a non-response.
You are essentially silent when faced with an argument that does not agree with your dogma. You believe in something that you cannot logically justify. Sounds like you are an adherent to the First Church of NASA.
dirtboy,
Take it up with NASA. They produced it.
Wow. It has a face!
S’allright? S’allright!
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