New Horizons Ultima Thule Flyby

[Deesse23]

Ummmmm, chocolate.

Aus Raider wird Twix
sonst ändert sich nix

[popeyespappy]

I believe that is what they were hoping for when they chose Ultima Thule for a flyby.

If we put the technical difficulties of finding and the sending New Horizon to image this object from earth into perspective,  we can liken its discovery to finding a object approximately half the size of a Twix bar, with reflectivity similar to a Twix bar, illuminated by moon light, from 5000 miles away.

Having new horizon send back images of it can be likened to using transmitter transmitting with as much power as would be released if 1 average bacteria were to fall a distance of 1cm on earth gravity every second, and receiving the signal, differentiating it from background noise, and construct a image from the data it contains, from 5000 miles away.

Think of that.  12 watts.   Received and interpreted 4.4 billion miles away.

The new Nova episode that was just broadcast tonight was about the New Horizon mission including the Ultima Thule flyby. They talked about some of the difficulties tracking the object. One thing they did was try to catch it as it eclipsed various stars. They sent people to Argentina and South Africa to try to catch it, but their orbital calculations were off so they got nothing. They tried it again from the South Pacific with the SOFIA infrared telescope aboard a 747, but got nothing again. One more try a week later in Patagonia. This time they got the shadow with an array of 5 small (by their standards) telescopes. It was enough for them to make a crude estimate of the oblong shape. It also helped them refine the orbit calculation which let them refine the New Horizon's trajectory to allow for a closer pass.

[vulcanlogician]

The new Nova episode that was just broadcast tonight was about the New Horizon mission including the Ultima Thule flyby. They talked about some of the difficulties tracking the object. One thing they did was try to catch it as it eclipsed various stars. They sent people to Argentina and South Africa to try to catch it, but their orbital calculations were off so they got nothing. They tried it again from the South Pacific with the SOFIA infrared telescope aboard a 747, but got nothing again. One more try a week later in Patagonia. This time they got the shadow with an array of 5 small (by their standards) telescopes. It was enough for them to make a crude estimate of the oblong shape. It also helped them refine the orbit calculation which let them refine the New Horizon's trajectory to allow for a closer pass.

It really puts things in perspective. You can't see anything of significant size without sunlight, and way out in the Kuiper belt, our sun is barely distinguishable from the other stars. Out there our sun is pretty much a key chain flashlight casting light upon an entire landscape. If there were a gas giant in interstellar space, it may as well be invisible. Nobody could create an artificial light source big enough to allow us to see what it looks like.


We're lucky to get any kind of image at all of Ultima Thule.

[Anomalocaris]

If there were a gas giant in interstellar space, it may as well be invisible. Nobody could create an artificial light source big enough to allow us to see what it looks like.

That’s not quite true.  Gas giant planets like Jupiter retain so much of its original heat of accretion that they would glow in infrared from their own internal warmth for 10+ billion years without needing any star to shine upon them.   We can use IR to detect a Jupiter like gas giant out to well beyond 2 light year if we knew where to look.   We could not miss a Jupiter within of half a light year of the sun.   As a matter of fact in an effort to determine whether the sun actually has a distant dim red dwarve companion star, we’ve already conducted whole sky IR surveys that directly ruled out the possibility that there is a Jupiter like gas giant plant anywhere in the outer reaches of the solar system out  to about 1000 times the distance to Ultima Thule.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Kinda like we stepped outside the house, looked around and didn't see any pyramids.

---

The new images -- taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach -- revealed Ultima Thule as a "contact binary," consisting of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 19 miles (31 kilometers) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere "Ultima" (12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere "Thule" (9 miles/14 kilometers across).

The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender.

"New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system. We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary formation, frozen in time," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and Geophysics team lead. "Studying Ultima Thule is helping us understand how planets form -- both those in our own solar system and those orbiting other stars in our galaxy."

Data from the New Year's Day flyby will continue to arrive over the next weeks and months, with much higher resolution images yet to come.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...164307.htm

[Anomalocaris]

Hmmm, still no more photos?

I am eager to see how cratered the object is. There seems to be at least one fair sized crater on the smaller lobe, the morphology suggest impact was on porous compressible material.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

A friend at JPL is trying to calculate the speed of impact based on the distortion at the juncture. I couldn't follow his math, something that never stopped him from sending it to me.