New Horizons meets Ultima Thule

[space otter]

SCIENCE 12/27/2018 05:57 pm ET
NASA's Close Encounter With Mysterious Space Object Will Make History On New Year's Day

The New Horizons probe is hurtling toward an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the mostly unexplored Kuiper Belt.

By Carol Kuruvilla

As revelers on the East Coast celebrate the arrival of a new year, scientists will be crossing another kind of frontier ― 4 billion miles from the sun.

Early on Jan. 1, NASA's New Horizons probe is scheduled to have a close encounter with the most distant planetary object that humans have ever studied.

The spacecraft, which zipped by Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, is now making its way toward 2014 MU69 ― a mysterious chunk of rock and ice in an almost entirely unexplored region of space.

The object is nicknamed Ultima Thule — "most distant" in Latin combined with the ancient Greeks' name for the world's northernmost place. The New Horizons mission team said the nickname refers to "a place beyond the known world." Ultima Thule is roughly the size of New York City and orbits the sun once every 297 years, according to National Geographic.

But it's Ultima Thule's location that makes it interesting to scientists. The object resides 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt. This region stretches around the sun and is home to millions of icy bodies. Scientists believe these bodies are leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago and have remained largely unchanged since then.

"It's the oldest relic of the solar system we've ever studied," New Horizons team member Marc Buie told National Geographic.

Alan Stern, the NASA mission's principal investigator, said in a Facebook Live video that scientists aren't sure what to expect from Ultima Thule. "When we fly past Ultima, we're going to have a chance to see the way things were back at the beginning," he said. "It's completely unknown and unexplored."

New Horizons launched into space in January 2006. Four years ago, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint Kuiper Belt objects within the spacecraft's reach and settled on Ultima Thule.

New Horizons is hurtling through space at 31,500 miles per hour (more than eight miles a second) to reach the object. As it passes Ultima Thule, it will take hundreds of photographs and other measurements to collect more information about the celestial body. The team hopes to map the object's surface, figure out its temperature and determine if it has an atmosphere, moons or rings.

According to a schedule released by the New Horizons team, the spacecraft will fly by Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 1. It will travel within 2,200 miles of the body, less than one-third the distance of its closest approach to Pluto.


NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
An illustration of the New Horizons probe's path through space, provided by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

There's still some uncertainty, though; New Horizons' images could come back blurred if Ultima Thule is rotating rapidly, National Geographic reports. And there's also a chance that the spacecraft's camera could miss it completely.

"We might get it, and we might not," Stern said on Facebook Live. "And if we get it, it's going to be spectacular."

The New Horizons team will be counting down to the spacecraft's closest approach to Ultima Thule early on New Year's Day. Some results from the encounter will be shared in the following days, but it will take the spacecraft until 2020 to send all the data from the encounter back to Earth.

Michael Buckley, the New Horizons team's media spokesperson, told HuffPost that the partial government shutdown that started Saturday will have no effect on the project's mission or science operations.

In case the shutdown remains in effect on Jan. 1, the team has partnered with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to provide live coverage of the flyby.

Coverage will be streamed on the laboratory's YouTube channel and the New Horizons mission website.


check this link for all the others mentioned
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-horizons-ultima-thule-new-years-day_us_5c24f92de4b05c88b6fe35dd

[fansongecho]

Sounds like a walk in the Park Space Otter  

New Horizons probe is travelling at 8.6'ish miles per second, its going to be over 4 billion miles from home, the target is the size of New York and NH closest approach is 2,200 miles? and its going to take thousands of images.. ..I am betting on.. we don't see a thing. proper LOL 

Wow NASA really must have some epic technology on board? 

I did a very quick look up at the size and make up of the belt - a couple of questions immediately come to mind about how the NASA New Horizons probe is going avoid becoming the NASA New Horizons "Swiss Cheese" during its transit of the Kuiper Belt?? 

I would love to watch this if there is a video link ??

Snip" -   
Beyond the gas giant Neptune lies a region of space filled with icy bodies. Known as the Kuiper Belt, this chilly expanse holds trillions of objects, remnants of the early solar system. Dutch astronomer Jan Oort first proposed in 1950 that some comets might come from the solar system's far suburbs.

That reservoir later became known as the Oort Cloud. Earlier, in 1943, astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth had suggested comets and larger bodies might exist beyond Neptune.

In 1951, astronomer Gerard Kuiper predicted the existence of a belt of icy objects that now bears his name. Some astronomers refer to it as the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt.

Astronomers are now hunting in the Kuiper Belt for a so-called "Planet Nine," a hypothetical world in the Kuiper Belt, after evidence of its existence was unveiled on Jan. 20, 2016. It is thought to be about 10 times the mass of Earth and 5,000 times the mass of Pluto.

The Kuiper Belt is an elliptical plane in space spanning from 30 to 55 times Earth's distance from the sun, or 2.5 to 4.5 billion miles (4.5 to 7.4 billion kilometers). The belt is similar to the asteroid belt found between Mars and Jupiter, although the objects in the Kuiper Belt tend more to be icy rather than rocky.

Scientists estimate that thousands of bodies more than 100 km (62 miles) in diameter travel around the sun within this belt, along with trillions of smaller objects, many of which are short-period comets. The region also contains several dwarf planets — round worlds too large to be considered asteroids and yet not qualifying as planets because they're too small, on an odd orbit, and don't clear out the space around them the way the eight planets do.

Despite its massive size, the Kuiper Belt wasn't discovered until 1992.
SNIP"

Just a quick one, you know when we see images of Jupiter and Saturn from spacecraft that take them on flyby's, can anyone calculate that the side that is light by the Sun would be as bright as the images suggest??

Jupiter is approx 484 million miles and Saturn is approx 890 million miles from the sun but both appear to have the same illumination factor when we see NASA images of them.

I would have thought that the inverse square law would be involved and so the objects would not have the same intensity of light from the sun?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

I am curious and also quite tired, its 3:30 am and I am only on Peg co's my partner is snoring her head off and I have de-camped to the spare bedroom with ma cat, best go soon, otherwise I wont be any good tomorrow
.
Cheers!

Fans and Mia <meow>

[space otter]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-horizons-ultima-thule-new-years-day_us_5c24f92de4b05c88b6fe35dd

Coverage will be streamed on the laboratory's YouTube channel and the New Horizons mission website.

https://www.youtube.com/user/jhuapl

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

[fansongecho]

Cheers Space 

[SerpUkhovian]

I am so disappointed.  I clicked on this thread thinking it would have new information on the Thule Society.  I had a passing interest in the Aryan Thule and the occultism of the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s.

[zorgon]

That's a whole lot of money wasted to go rock hunting

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[ArMaP]

I did a very quick look up at the size and make up of the belt - a couple of questions immediately come to mind about how the NASA New Horizons probe is going avoid becoming the NASA New Horizons "Swiss Cheese" during its transit of the Kuiper Belt?? 

Although the Kuiper belt has many objects, it's size makes the object density very low.

Just a quick one, you know when we see images of Jupiter and Saturn from spacecraft that take them on flyby's, can anyone calculate that the side that is light by the Sun would be as bright as the images suggest??

Jupiter is approx 484 million miles and Saturn is approx 890 million miles from the sun but both appear to have the same illumination factor when we see NASA images of them.

I would have thought that the inverse square law would be involved and so the objects would not have the same intensity of light from the sun?

Two words: exposure time.

When we have little light available to take a photo we can change the length of time the sensor receives light, so the accumulation of light during that time will be able to create an image when the original circumstances would not allow it.

That's how I took a photo of a comet a few years ago, even though it was not visible to the naked eye. I looked at an astronomy program to know where it should be, pointed the came, choose a long exposure time and pressed the button. 16 seconds latter I had this photo.



Edited to add that this is the reason why they say that "images could come back blurred if Ultima Thule is rotating rapidly", with a long exposure time, if Ultima Thule is rotating relatively rapidly, it will rotate visibly during the time the photo is being taken, resulting in a blurred image.

[fansongecho]

Thanks for the reply ArMap, ref the exposure time of the images from Saturn and Jupiter, would you be able to calculate the rotation of the gas giants and the exposure time to eliminate any potential blurring of the images and use a computer to "clean" or reduce a "smear" effect of those images ?
Thanks,

Fans'

[zorgon]

Edited to add that this is the reason why they say that "images could come back blurred if Ultima Thule is rotating rapidly", with a long exposure time, if Ultima Thule is rotating relatively rapidly, it will rotate visibly during the time the photo is being taken, resulting in a blurred image.

So... good old NASA goes all that way out there, spemds all that money, and all we will get is BLURRED ROCKS?







WHY didn't they just use old school low light film? Way back in high school in photography class I was using H&W Control Film (released back in the 70's from military use)  You could literally snap a picture at night under just a street lamp and it came out looking like it was taken during the day. The secret was in the developer   You could do great night photography or awesome enlargements. I still have some of my old photos  I will have to scan the.

Imagine standing at one end of a football field and taking a picture of the people in the stands at the other end... with a simple 35 mm reflex cameras no telephoto lens... and blowing up someones face to get a clear 8 x 10 portrait.

Now had they used THAT for the Lunar Orbiter photos we would see everything

H&W Control was patented in the U.S. in 1972 under Patent No. 3772019 (Holden & Weichert, 1973). The patent has since expired. An example formulation given in the patent is shown below.





I still have that old camera

[ArMaP]

Thanks for the reply ArMap, ref the exposure time of the images from Saturn and Jupiter, would you be able to calculate the rotation of the gas giants and the exposure time to eliminate any potential blurring of the images and use a computer to "clean" or reduce a "smear" effect of those images ?

This photo has an exposure duration of 38 seconds.



Knowing that Saturn takes 10 hours and 33 minutes to do a 360º rotation and on that photo Saturn has an apparent diameter of 700 pixels, resulting in a perimeter of 2199 pixels, a full rotation of those 2199 in 10 hours and 33 minutes means that for each pixel it would take around 164 seconds for it to completely move to a new position, so an exposure of 38 seconds, being less that a quarter of a pixel would not result in noticeable motion blur.

As far as I know there's no way of removing motion blur, as the new image is added to the image already present, it's like adding several numbers and just with that information know what was the first number.

[fansongecho]

*DRUMS FINGERS* 

Not long now then.. 

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/videos/index.html

[space otter]

[fansongecho]

Cheers Space - it kicks off at 21 mins 

data sheet -
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nh-fact-sheet-2015_0.pdf

[space otter]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/science/nasa-spacecraft-confirms-successful-flyby-of-distant-solar-system-object/ar-BBRG0Vu?li=BBnb7Kz




Loren Grush  4 hrs ago

NASA spacecraft confirms successful flyby of distant Solar System object

NASA received a critical signal from one of its most distant spacecraft Tuesday morning, confirming that the vehicle has just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System.

That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant — and most primitive — object that's ever been visited by humanity.

"We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feat. "We've just accomplished the most distant flyby."

It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.

While it zoomed by, New Horizons tried to gather as much information as it could about the rock. Equipped with seven science instruments, the spacecraft snapped pictures, mapped the object's surface, and took the temperature of its surroundings. All of this data should help scientists learn more about this strange rock, a type of object that we've never explored up close before.

Ultima Thule is an object in the Kuiper Belt — a large region of the Solar System located beyond the orbit of Neptune. This area is filled with potentially millions of fragmented icy bodies, making it similar to the distant Asteroid Belt. Except the objects in the Kuiper Belt aren't asteroids. They're thought to be extremely primitive fragments of the Solar System, frozen in time ever since the planets first formed 4.5 billion years ago. They've remained relatively unchanged since the birth of our cosmic neighborhood.

We first learned of the existence of the Kuiper Belt three decades ago, and we've been trying to fully map it out in the years since. But this is the first time we've actually seen one of these objects within a relatively short distance.

New Horizons came within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule's surface — about the distance between the East and West Coast of the United States. And from that vantage point, the spacecraft could tell us a lot about what kinds of materials Ultima Thule is made of. And that could ultimately reveal what materials were lingering around when the Solar System first came into being.

But getting to this particular space rock has been an incredible challenge and a 13-year journey. Ultima Thule is only about 20 miles across, around the size of New York City, which makes it super hard to track from Earth.

And its vast distance from the Sun makes it incredibly faint. Plus, getting a signal out to New Horizons right now takes about six hours, so the spacecraft can't be controlled in real time. All of the flyby procedures had to be uploaded to the spacecraft in advance, and New Horizons then had to do everything on its own.

It's because of this communication delay that scientists did not know if the flyby was a success until late Tuesday morning. New Horizons actually zoomed by Ultima Thule at 12:33 AM ET, and then sent a signal back to Earth confirming it was in good health a few hours later. NASA received that signal at around 10:31 AM ET. With that signal, the New Horizons team confirmed that all of the spacecraft's subsystems were working properly.

That's going to make getting data back from New Horizons a very slow process. Later Tuesday afternoon, the spacecraft team will reveal an image of Ultima Thule taken by the vehicle the day before the flyby. But in that picture, Ultima Thule will only be about five to six pixels across. The spacecraft will send back the first high-resolution images of Ultima Thule from the flyby later Tuesday evening, and the mission team will reveal them to the public on January 2nd. Those pictures should give us a definitive answer on what Ultima Thule's shape looks like.

It's going to be slow drip of data for a while. It'll take about 20 months for New Horizons to send back all of the information it's gathered on Ultima Thule. But that data holds critical clues about one of the most ancient objects we've ever visited in the Solar System. So over the next two years, we'll get as much information as we can about an entirely new class of object that was around when the planets were being born.

[space otter]

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46742298

Nasa's New Horizons: 'Snowman' shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed
By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
2 hours ago

NASA/JHU-APL/SWRI
The "snowman" completes a full rotation every 15 hours
The ice world known as Ultima Thule has finally been revealed.

A new picture returned from Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft shows the little world to be two objects joined together - to give a look like a "snowman".

The US probe's images acquired as it approached Ultima hinted at the possibility of a double body, but the first detailed picture from Tuesday's close flyby confirms it.

New Horizons encountered Ultima 6.5 billion km from Earth.

The event set a record for the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. The previous mark was also set by New Horizons when it flew past the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015.

But Ultima is 1.5 billion km further out.

Nasa probe survives distant flyby
Agonising wait for Ultima Thule news
Voyager 2 probe 'leaves Solar System'
It orbits the Sun in a region of the Solar System known as the Kuiper belt.

There are hundreds of thousands of Kuiper members like Ultima, and their frigid state almost certainly holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago.

The mission team thinks the two spheres that make up this particular object probably joined right at the beginning, or very shortly after.

The scientists have decided to call the larger lobe "Ultima", and the smaller lobe "Thule". The volume ratio is three to one.

Jeff Moore, a New Horizons co-investigator from Nasa's Ames Research Center, said the pair would have come together at very low speed, at maybe 2-3km/h. He joked: "If you had a collision with another car at those speeds you may not even bother to fill out the insurance forms."

NASA/JHU-APL/SWRI
Overall, Ultima Thule is dark, but there is quite a bit of brightness variation

NASA/JHU-APL/SWRI
One of the probe's instruments recorded the colour (L) which has been laid over the high-resolution B&W image (C) to produce a combination (R)

The new data from Nasa's spacecraft also shows just how dark the object is. Its brightest areas reflect just 13% of the light falling on them; the darkest, just 6%. That's similar to potting soil, said Cathy Olkin, the mission's deputy project scientist.

It has a tinge of colour, however. "We had a rough colour from Hubble but now we can definitely say that Ultima Thule is red," added colleague Carly Howett.

"Our current theory as to why Ultima Thule is red is the irradiation of exotic ices." Essentially, its surface has been "burnt" over the eons by the high-energy cosmic rays and X-rays that flood space.

Principal Investigator Alan Stern paid tribute to the skill of his team in acquiring the image as New Horizons flew past the object at 3,500km at closest approach.

The probe had to target Ultima very precisely to be sure of getting it centre-frame in the view of the cameras and other instruments onboard.

"[Ultima's] only really the size of something like Washington DC, and it's about as reflective as garden variety dirt, and it's illuminated by a Sun that's 1,900 times fainter than it is outside on a sunny day here on the Earth. We were basically chasing it down in the dark at 32,000mph (51,000km/h) and all that had to happen just right," he said.

Less than 1% of all the data gathered by New Horizons during the flyby has been downlinked to Earth. The slow data-rates from the Kuiper belt mean it will be fully 20 months before all the information is pulled off the spacecraft.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/834/cpsprodpb/8FF4/production/_105025863_datapic-new_horizons-tip5o-nc.png

What's so special about the Kuiper belt?
Several factors make Ultima Thule, and the domain in which it moves, so interesting to scientists.

One is that the Sun is so dim in this region that temperatures are down near 30-40 degrees above absolute zero - the lower end of the temperature scale and the coldest atoms and molecules can possibly get. As a result, chemical reactions have essentially stalled. This means Ultima is in such a deep freeze that it is probably perfectly preserved in the state in which it formed.

Another factor is that Ultima is small (about 33km in the longest dimension), and this means it doesn't have the type of "geological engine" that in larger objects will rework their composition.

And a third factor is just the nature of the environment. It's very sedate in the Kuiper belt.

Unlike in the inner Solar System, there are probably very few collisions between objects. The Kuiper belt hasn't been stirred up.

New Horizons' Principal Investigator Alan Stern said: "Everything that we're going to learn about Ultima - from its composition to its geology, to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere, and that kind of thing - is going to teach us about the original formation conditions in the Solar System that all the other objects we've gone out and orbited, flown by and landed on can't tell us because they're either large and evolve, or they are warm. Ultima is unique."

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/834/cpsprodpb/13B17/production/_105036608_pluto_flyby_640_-3x_v2-nc.png

What does New Horizons do next?
First, the scientists must work on the Ultima data, but they will also ask Nasa to fund a further extension to the mission.

The hope is that the course of the spacecraft can be altered slightly to visit at least one more Kuiper belt object sometime in the next decade.

New Horizons should have just enough fuel reserves to be able to do this. Critically, it should also have sufficient electrical reserves to keep operating its instruments into the 2030s.

The longevity of New Horizon's plutonium battery may even allow it to record its exit from the Solar System.

The two 1970s Voyager missions have both now left the heliosphere - the bubble of gas blown off our Sun (one definition of the Solar System's domain). Voyager 2 only recently did it, in November.

And in case you were wondering, New Horizons will never match the Voyagers in terms of distance travelled from Earth. Although New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched in 2006, it continues to lose ground to the older missions. The reason: the Voyagers got a gravitational speed boost when they passed the outer planets. Voyager-1 is now moving at almost 17km/s; New Horizons is moving at 14km/s.

The BBC's Sky At Night programme will broadcast a special episode on the flyby on Sunday 13 January on BBC Four at 22:30 GMT. Presenter Chris Lintott will review the event and discuss some of the new science to emerge from the encounter with the New Horizons team.