Ultima Thule Flyby tonight - a billion miles beyond Pluto

[noblegiraffe]

New Horizons, the spacecraft that took the photos of Pluto is now 4 billion miles from Earth and tonight (not sure of our time) will be conducting a flyby of a small object in the Kuiper Belt that we don’t even know for sure what it looks like, possibly two potatoes stuck together. Tomorrow afternoon photos should start coming in if the flyby is successful.

Anyway I’m excited, anyone else?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737

Love things like this - so exciting!

Ooh, yes! Thank you for the link.

Put a bookmark - thank you for the link.

If anyone’s interested in details about how Ultima Thule was decided as the destination, this twitter thread is really interesting:
twitter.com/alex_parker/status/1077986070128668674?s=21

New Horizons was sent to explore Pluto, we know Pluto exists. The plan was to then explore a world beyond Pluto. They knew where New Horizons was headed, the task was to find a suitable object on its trajectory. The problem was they couldn’t actually see clearly 4 billion miles away because there were too many stars in the background.

So Ultima Thule was only discovered in 2014 after a lot of hard work, we’ve only seen it as a pixel on a telescope image and we only think it might be two objects stuck together/orbiting because of the shadow it cast when it passed in front of a star.

And tomorrow, fingers crossed, we’ll get close up photos.

Worse than looking for a needle in a haystack!

I'm very very excited about this!

Thanks for this, I had no idea and am enjoying learning about it.

Definitely psyched for those first images. I'm expecting it to look a lot like comet 67P from the Rosetta mission, but it could be totally different.

Imagine if it turns out to be an alien spaceship! (Yeah, not very likely, but still, I can dream).

I am very excited about this, I would have loved to have studied astrophysics but my maths ability peaked at GCSE level so no chance.

I am very interested in this.

Atchiclees - Have you considered self-studying GCSE Astronomy for pleasure? It's a really absorbing course, and the Ultima Thule mission fits in perfectly with the curriculum content.

The message back from Ultima Thule confirming a successful flyby is expected at about 3:30pm

Memories of Beagle 2 putting a dampener on Christmas Day is making me nervous.

My DS is SO excited and keeps asking me hard questions

Timeline:
15:28GMT – health data, no science
20:15GMT – first 100 pixel image
01:55GMT – 200 pixel image (maybe)

But the images won’t be published immediately so we might not see them till tomorrow (they’ll need time to airbrush out the aliens).

I am sitting here watching a recording of the livestram panel discussions etc.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBGMhNIbRwY

You can't get this kind of job satisfaction with a well tended file [seufz = sigh]

Woohoo, contact made, all looking good for data transfer later today.

Latest info from the BBC:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46729898

I know this is really pathetic, but I actually had no idea the distances involved within our own solar system were that huge!

Even reading about it makes me feel really dizzy 😵 Anyone else?

Following thread. My aspie son is currently obsessed with space and Ultima Thule.

I followed on www.space.com live stream. I subscribed to get a notification for the next installment.
My Aspie son has absolutely no interest, so I am on my own - well, with you.

First picture in and Ultima Thule looks like BB8!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46742298

So pleased the camera was pointing in the right direction.