On New Year’s Day, a spacecraft will zoom by the most distant object humanity has ever visited

[nivek]

On New Year’s Day, a spacecraft will zoom by the most distant object humanity has ever visited

Just after midnight on January 1st, a NASA spacecraft will whiz past the most distant space rock that’s ever been visited in our Solar System. This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood.

The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it’s been traveling through space for the last 13 years. You may remember this famous bot: it was the first human-made object to ever visit Pluto in the summer of 2015. Ever since that flyby, New Horizons has been plunging farther into the Solar System. Three years later, it’s ready to meet up with another faraway target, a rock nicknamed Ultima Thule located 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. That’s 4.1 billion miles from Earth.

------------

Successfully passing by Ultima Thule is going to be an incredibly challenging task. Because it’s so small and so far away, the object is hard to see and track from Earth. And the New Horizons team only has one chance to get this flyby right. The spacecraft is currently traveling through space at 32,000 miles per hour. If something gets botched, there’s no way to turn New Horizons around and try again. “Like Pluto, it’s a one shot,” says Stern. “We don’t have a second spacecraft coming by a week later. And because it’s a very complex enterprise to do one of these flybys, there are literally hundreds of variables that all have to choreograph perfectly.”

New Horizons wasn’t always guaranteed a visit to an object like Ultima Thule. The vehicle’s primary mission was to fly by Pluto, with the possibility of passing by a second Kuiper Belt object later. But when the spacecraft first launched from Earth in January 2006, astronomers didn’t even know if there was an object close enough to Pluto that New Horizons could target. All the objects we knew about at the time were out of reach. So while the New Horizons team prepped for Pluto, they also searched the sky for the spacecraft’s second destination. Finally in 2014, they found a target using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope: a Kuiper Belt object named 2014 MU69.

Ultima Thule, as seen by New Horizons’ onboard camera LORRI on Christmas Eve

In 2017, New Horizons scientists were able to observe Ultima Thule as it passed in front of a background star. It was a momentary eclipse, known as an occultation, in which Ultima Thule briefly blocked out the star’s light. From that split-second crossing, the scientists were able to get a better understanding of the rock’s shape. All indications point to this rock being weird. In fact, it may not even be a single rock. The occultation revealed that Ultima Thule is either shaped like a rubber duck, looking a bit like two mounds squashed together. Or it could be two separate rocks orbiting super close to one another. We really won’t know for sure until just a day or two before New Horizons reaches Ultima Thule. The tiny object is 100 times smaller than Pluto, making it harder to see in advance with New Horizons’ onboard cameras. The best pictures won’t come until New Horizons is more or less on top of the object.

(more to read on the link)

.

 

[nivek]

Sounds like the probe flew by successfully, we should see some pictures late tonight or tomorrow...

NASA spacecraft confirms successful flyby of distant Solar System object

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.

.