Not to detract at all from the astonishing technical achievement, but that's the wrong comparison. You can see the ISS with your naked eye, and it's a <1 mile object flying past at 4.8 miles/sec. The right comparison is with the distance at which this photo was taken: 18,000 miles, or about half an hour from closest approach.
Actually, the right comparison is of the closest approach distance (~2000 miles) with the distance from earth (4,000,000,000 miles). That's like launching a missile from Los Angeles to New York and hitting your target to within a meter.
Implicit in this statement: the camera was pointing close to the direction of travel and the target wasn't moving much within the field of view. Hugely easier than trying to image from the side at closest approach, which at best would have given a smeared image and at worst a complete miss.
It's still impressive and awesome. But always try to skew the odds of success in your favor when dealing with stuff like this. You have one pass and then the opportunity is gone.
As long you have navigation(GPS) and fuel(to make adjustments), that shouldn't be a problem?
But of course you don't have a map in space, so how do you navigate, and course correct etc, is another big puzzle in itself.
The book Digital Apollo touches on a wide range of issues associated with building systems that can do this.
So refreshing to hear that a double is good enough for JPL when repeatedly told it's not good enough for mere dollars and cents.
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9556/how-does-new-...
I cannot speak for this probe, but other probes have made the probe itself or camera boom move slightly to compensate for the target moving relative to the probe. It's kind of like moving your head back and forth to follow a tennis match if your eyes alone have difficulty tracking.
The object looks like BB-8. We'll get even better pics in the coming weeks.
Welded together by gravity, i'm really in awe seeing the, by far, weakest power so lovely at work.
This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me. I'm not saying it's artificial. That would be even more unlikely, by orders of magnitude. Just saying "Wow!".
At this mass these bodies are at, they aren't going to crush together from gravity to form a single round body.
However, if you've got two bodies in very similar orbits around the Sun, in close proximity, it doesn't seem incredible to me that they might eventually collide and stick.
Once they are orbiting each other then it’s just a matter of time for the orbits to decay. In the final, they would be spinning very very fast but would be inching towards each other until they touch.
I don't know if this is how it actually happens, but it gives a mechanism for this being fairly common. The only information I could find was a short wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_binary_(small_Solar_Sy...
As seen in the combined image. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Galleries/Featured-Images/pics800wid...
The 21st century world of asteroid and Kuiper belt colonization is going to be far fluffier and squishier than we thought it would be in 80's Sci-fi!
Just one thing: it would be great if NASA dropped imperial units as main units in such articles.
substantive content: new horizons uses a modified MIPS R3000 CPU (ok, not the PSX's GPU, and not used for everything on NH, but) https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7551365/playstation-cpu-p...
I think the images are the first thing that get downloaded, so it should not take more than a week to get all high res images.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Telecommunication...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/Ultima_Online...
Image of the occultation profile vs actual shape: https://i.imgur.com/PNh4nmX.png
Each line is the same star viewed from a different point on Earth. They arranged for telescopes in a long line North to South to all observe UT at the same time, just as it was predicted to pass in front of the star. Then they precisely timed the apparent blinks of the star. The North-South offset meant the star bisected UT across different sections for each telescope. Then they just worked out the parallax difference and mapped out the blink times on a chart to see the silhouette.
Wednesdays news conference speculated UT shape is primordial, while the others may have been carved through four billion years of planetary evolution.
But the asymmetry of Ultima Thule means that its gravitational field would be weird. Not like a sphere at all. So the acceleration of gravity and escape velocity would vary a lot from place to place.
And just for fun, I also worked out a best guess for the force between the two "lobes": 1.5 x 10^13 N (assuming Ultima Thule is the same density as our Moon), which is about equal to the (Earth) weight of all the ships in the world. [0]
Are these common in the asteroid belt or as smaller moons of the outer planets?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-New-Horizons-Inside-Mission/d...
I remember reading they were going to aim for 2000 miles from Ultima Thule, was the closest approach revised to 18,000 miles?
It's a neat picture, but I fear that any subsequent pictures will have less impact on the public, as many laymen will say "Meh, saw that the other day on <insert_news_site>. Old news".
I'm really looking forward to the spectacular shots we will get from the close-in imager. New Horizons will be MUCH closer to this object than it was Pluto, so it should really get some fantastic shots of the surface features.
For comparison, just check out the wikipedia pages. They show a pretty solid contrast of the capabilities/uses of the two devices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Reconnaissance_Imag...
Then I get sad because things just take so incredibly long on a stellar scale, and a human life is so short.
Mimas (and Iaepetus too) really looks like the Death Star and now this thing looks like BB-8.
Ultima Thule-BB-8 comparison: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dv7psG3VYAA8jqa.jpg
Mimas-Death Star comparison: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/575/1*nUxm5MD_2xO5Y9Lorr...
Iaepetus-Death Star comparison: https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/80/750x445/8290...
