New Horizons

[Bob Schroeck]

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

Bump for the next destination: Ultima Thule

Flyby is tonight, peoples. We will now have a bunch of data on... some random rock in space. Woo!

[Labster]

And it's a bowling pin.

We don't have any good pictures back, but here's a twitter thread on how Ultima Thule was discovered, as Pluto currently lies annoyingly in the middle of the galactic plane right now.

[Labster]

Wait, no, it's a snowman. Either that, or two ginger cookies that ended up baked together... but nah, snowman. It's probably made of mostly ice anyway.

Better pictures will be out in a couple weeks. NH will be behind the Sun for a few days this week, so not too much data right away.

And then, onto... somewhere. New Horizons has a lot of fuel left, it's more a problem of nowhere to go. See the link in my last post to how annoying it is to find faint new asteroids against all of the stars in the galaxy. It's so distant that NH might have to use its onboard LORRI imager and image processing to look for its own destination.

[classicdrogn]

(insert Frozen meme here)

If anything, I'd be more enthusiastic about a probe using its onboard instruments to discover new objects to investigate - even if there is a remote decision loop back to earth in there, it's still a step forward in the overall process of space exploration for everything originating on our one little pale blue dot.

[Labster]

[robkelk]

Wait, no, it's a snowman.  Either that, or two ginger cookies that ended up baked together... but nah, snowman.  It's probably made of mostly ice anyway.

Better pictures will be out in a couple weeks.  ...

No, "ginger cookies" is closer.

However, analyses of newly beamed-back images -- including many taken soon after closest approach -- shows eclipsed stars re-appearing sooner than expected. The only explanation possible is that this 30-km long Kuiper belt object has a different 3D shape than believed only a few weeks ago. Specifically, as shown in the featured illustration, it now appears that the larger lobe -- Ultima -- is more similar to a fluffy pancake than a sphere, while the smaller lobe -- Thule -- resembles a dented walnut.