It has a catalog number.

It is remote, dead, and colder than a witches tit.

As for naming it, I have (IIRC) a 1/12 interest if it ever came up, and I think it is unlikely in the extreme for it to ever come up.

I'd probably vote for 'Bruce' or something silly.

This iceball is of so little conceivable consequence to anything else its remoteness and coldness pale in comparison.

Still, 12 people spent time hunting it's little frozen corpse down in the impotent hope New Horizons might have been capable of reaching it.  And then of course, the 12 co-discoverers would be minor celebrities, harvesting our 15 minutes of fame.

Anyhow, new Horizons has been deflected to another iceball, and to my thinking, a less interesting one since it is smaller.

And that one won't have a crater on it eventually named for my username on an otherwise obscure science message board.

(July 19, 2016 at 11:57 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: It is remote, dead, and colder than a witches tit.

I've always been curious, when and how exactly did we decide that a witch's tit was a unit of measurement for temperature?
And what is the scale on witch's tits? Like, how many witch's tits equals 32°F or 0°C?

So vorlon, tell us the story how you co-discovered the snowball! What equipment did you use, how did you make the discovery etc.?

Icehunters.

There was an organized project on the internet to examine photos taken with the Subaru Telescope for potential flyby targets for New Horizons after it went past Pluto last summer.

You signed on, and then started looking at thumbnail image pairs. The idea was to highlight differences in the images. Differences would potentially indicate something had moved in the pictures, and since distant KBOs move, and the even more distant stars don't, by highlighting differences, you were potentially discovering KBOs.

There were difficulties, variable stars would simulate what we were looking for. And the image pairs were taken on different nights, so if the seeing conditions were different, and they usually were, there would be problems with the images.

Many, many problems.

I think the ratio of false positives to actual confirmed KBOs was like 1500 or so. So for every KBO ID'd in the project, 1500+ false positives had to be weeded out.

They also wanted multiple 'hits' for every potential target noted, so the one I found that was confirmed, there were at least 11 others that noted the same one I did.

They changed the confirmation criteria during the hunt too, pictures with (IIRC) with more than 3 potential hits were tossed. Turned out some of those were valid hits, so they started including them.

And then when all the images had been scanned and all the new KBOs ID'd and their positions compared to what maneuvering capability New Horizons had left, not one was a suitable target.

So they got some observing time on Hubble, lest the follow on flyby fail to occur, and Hubble images noted 2 targets. They picked one, New Horizons fired thrusters to target it last fall, and we are on our way to closely examine it in a few years.

(July 19, 2016 at 11:20 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The big bounce



usually leads to a big enough bang.

Not in my experience.

Additionally, when New Horizons was launched, they were pretty sure 2 follow on encounters would be possible.

Turns out they were pretty lucky to get one.

Glad Hubble was made available.

Flyby is in 2 1/2 years.

AFAIK, the target KBO selected, 2014 MU69, isn't even visible in the NH cameras yet and won't be for at least another year.


From Wiki:

Course adjustment was done in late October and early November for a January 1, 2019, flyby.[155][156] Funding was secured in July 1, 2016.[132]
Encounter with 2014 MU69

Objectives of this mission include:[157]

Mapping the surface geology to learn how it formed and has evolved
Measuring the surface temperature
Mapping the 3D surface topography and surface composition to learn how it is similar to and how it is different from comets like 67P and dwarf planets such as Pluto
Searching for any signs of activity, such as a cloud-like coma
Searching for, and studying, any satellites or rings
Measuring or constraining its mass

The new mission began on October 22, when New Horizons carried out the first in a series of four initial targeting maneuvers designed to send it toward 2014 MU69. The maneuver, which started at approximately 19:50 UTC on October 22, used two of the spacecraft's small hydrazine-fueled thrusters, lasted approximately 16 minutes and changed the spacecraft's trajectory by about 10 meters per second (33 ft/s). The remaining three targeting maneuvers took place on October 25, October 28, and November 4, 2015

vorlon13 Wrote:Heh, heh, maybe a "big bounce" just looks like that to us when it's really a pair of universes diverging from a point.  It looks like a big bounce to us, but time runs backwards in the other one, so it's a universe expanding just like ours is.




Good luck trying to design some lab experiments to prove that CF . . .

Although I suppose from our point of view, it's contracting.....

and what do they think about us ?

bwa, ha, ha, ha !!

(July 20, 2016 at 11:18 am)vorlon13 Wrote: Additionally, when New Horizons was launched, they were pretty sure 2 follow on encounters would be possible.

Turns out they were pretty lucky to get one.

Glad Hubble was made available.

Flyby is in 2 1/2 years.

AFAIK, the target KBO selected, 2014 MU69,  isn't even visible in the NH cameras yet and won't be for at least another year.


From Wiki:

Course adjustment was done in late October and early November for a January 1, 2019, flyby.[155][156] Funding was secured in July 1, 2016.[132]
Encounter with 2014 MU69

Objectives of this mission include:[157]

   Mapping the surface geology to learn how it formed and has evolved
   Measuring the surface temperature
   Mapping the 3D surface topography and surface composition to learn how it is similar to and how it is different from comets like 67P and dwarf planets such as Pluto
   Searching for any signs of activity, such as a cloud-like coma
   Searching for, and studying, any satellites or rings
   Measuring or constraining its mass

The new mission began on October 22, when New Horizons carried out the first in a series of four initial targeting maneuvers designed to send it toward 2014 MU69. The maneuver, which started at approximately 19:50 UTC on October 22, used two of the spacecraft's small hydrazine-fueled thrusters, lasted approximately 16 minutes and changed the spacecraft's trajectory by about 10 meters per second (33 ft/s). The remaining three targeting maneuvers took place on October 25, October 28, and November 4, 2015

Did they plan the encounter trajectory with Pluto with the intention of emerging from the encounter on course to intercept another object, or was that just a bonus made possible by chance alignment?

There are 'theoretically' enough objects beyond Pluto that with the maneuvering capability NH has remaining (up to around 1 degree of deflection up, down, left, right and anything in between) there might have been 2 reachable, sequentially.

As we found out on the Ice Hunters project, those objects might be there, but if we can't see them from here, it isn't possible to direct New Horizons to one or two of them though.

Hubble sure made it look easy, I can assure you, ground based imaging for this task is really difficult.

So it isn't a 'chance' alignment, the chance is there are many objects out there, but seeing them in time to steer towards one is the trick. New Horizons has a good camera, but even as close as it is, Hubble is way better at finding them.

And even with a better camera on New Horizons, the data rate back to earth isn't high enough to send back scads of pictures with possible rocks and/or ice balls in them for us to search either. New Horizons was very carefully designed; it can hold enough data from a useful Pluto flyby, it can gather that same amount of data in the time available during the Pluto encounter, and the radio is just powerful enough to send all the data back in around a year. If you beef up one capability, it doesn't help unless you beef up all of them, and then the craft is too heavy to get to Pluto. It really was carefully optimized.

It's kind of overkill for the upcoming flyby, but it's there, and all we had to do was look to find something else to look over.

I was hoping for 2 or even 3 objects, if all 3 were wildly different or terribly similar, you really learn something about all the stuff out there. If you only look at one, then if it is super bland, or super weird, you don't really know too much about the others.

And they are taking distant looks at some of the others (Idunno about mine, btw) when they are bright/close enough to study as NH moves further and further out.