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I wonder if it or one of its sister vehicles will ever sit in the Smithsonian? Once we have the technology to catch up to one in a few months or a year. At that point they would be scientifically worthless, but priceless as far as an early space success!
not to be a naysayer but i don't think we'll ever get nearly that star trek. in a few decades their radio signals will all be dead, they'll be well outside the solar system, untracked, location unknown, smaller than a grain of sand in a vast ocean, with no scotty to beam them down
30 minutes into New Years Day? Seems appropriate but, possibly not good for news coverage. While all the TV channels will still be showing replays of a fiberglass ball in Manhattan, an incredible encounter with another world billions of miles away will go largely ignored.
So happily, I'm not placing any bets on what this thing is gonna look like because newly seen images of worlds beyond Earth are reliably surprising every time. I can't remember anytime an image of a new world has come back from a probe and it looked exactly like what we expected.
What I really want to know is if the encounter will be covered live on NASA TV? Will we be able to see the first images come in as it happens or will we have to wait till the next morning and search for it online with a hangover?
the craft may pass ultima thule at that time, but it will take several hours for radio transmission to arrive just acknowledging the flyby's success, and it will take many hours more for the first images to be downloaded, processed, and publicly shown, and a year longer to get the rest, so in other words the first big flyby data will come no sooner than jan 2 which might be a great day to break the news!
Guess you meant a day longer to get the rest . But otherwise you're right .The spacecraft must be at least a light -day away from us. The Voyagers brothers are more than twenty light-hours away.
it'll take many months to get all the data. the download rate is only a couple kilobytes or so per second. it took 2 years to download all the pics from the pluto flyby, and new horizons is significantly farther away now 3 years later
new horizons is currently just over 6 light-hours away from earth
Most of NASA's staff are furloughed due to the government shutdown, other than critical personnel. I'm sure no one involved with the flyby operation is going to skip their duties even if they aren't paid, but the TV broadcast may not be implemented.
Good news! I just checked the schedule of upcoming live events on NASA.TV and there WILL be a live broadcast of the New Horizons encounter with Ultima Thule. (which sounds like the name of an evil spirit character from Ghost Busters but hey) Here's a link to that schedule... https://www.nasa.gov/multim...
It was also the name of the distant frozen planet in an episode of Space:1999 called "Death's Other Dominion". With Brian Blessed chewing the frozen scenery.
Thule is the name of a place in north Greenland which seems central to the Inuit people.
I leave you dream about the added meaning of Ultima.
To explain the light curve, has anyone considered the possibility that it's like those earth asteroids that have the same period as the earth, encounter the earth then race far from the earth over and over? (I forget the exact name but i think their overall name are 1 of the ?Apollo? asteroids?)
how would that explain the (lack of) light curve?
Not sure of what a 'small' light curve means .A curve is neither big nor small in usual scientific parlance. Does that mean that the difference between maximum and minimum luminosity is small in comparison with the average luminosity ?
i didn't mention a "small" curve but yes we are talking about the maximum and minimum luminosity variation that NASA talks about as it's light curve
It wasn't you indeed. I adressed the wrong person ,sorry .But the paper quotes New Horizon P .I . as saying something about a 'tiny light curve ' which I found strange .
Thanks for demanding clarification. IOW the companion is now so far away that it's no longer visible in the same frame. It would demand the rather improbable event that occultation occurred at the same time as perigee.
interesting idea but personally i think such a companion would have to be really small, probably too small to have been detected, or else with a larger size the center of mass would make ultima thule measurably swing around within its orbit. i also think a companion wouldn't be able to have a large and irregular orbit because ultima thule is only around 20 miles in size and doesn't exert much gravitational pull for that
