LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Hundreds of well-wishers took part in a different kind of New Year\u2019s countdown, 33 minutes past midnight, to celebrate the moment when NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past an icy object known as Ultima Thule, more than 4 billion miles away.<\/p>\n
The revelers here at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory didn\u2019t yet know for sure whether the piano-sized probe actually survived the encounter. Because of the complicated schedule for New Horizons\u2019 observations, plus the 6-hour-plus time it takes for radio signals to travel from Ultima Thule to NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network, definitive word of success (or failure) won\u2019t come until hours later on New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
Despite the uncertainty, tonight\u2019s gathering had many of the trappings of a New Year\u2019s Eve party, including sparkling wine and party hats. Mission team members and New Horizons\u2019 fans, plus family members, noshed on hors d\u2019oeuvres and watched presentations and performances (including a sing-along in New Horizons\u2019 honor) during the buildup to 12:33 a.m. ET (9:33 p.m. PT Dec. 31).<\/p>\n
Just after midnight, rock-star astrophysicist Brian May \u2014 who has gained fame for his 3-D astronomical imagery as well as for his riffs as lead guitarist for the rock group Queen \u2014 unveiled the full version of a rock anthem he wrote for the occasion.<\/p>\n
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said the mission\u2019s results could rock planetary science to a similar degree. Tonight\u2019s event marked history\u2019s farthest-out encounter with a celestial body, in an icy outer region of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are going to change what we know about the Kuiper Belt literally overnight,\u201d Stern told the audience during one of the pre-flyby panel discussions.<\/p>\n
The encounter with Ultima Thule (\u201cUl-ti-ma Too-lee,\u201d from a Latin phrase that basically signifies \u201ca place beyond the known world\u201d) comes almost 13 years since New Horizons was launched in 2006, and three and a half years since the probe flew past Pluto in 2015. The mission team selected Ultima, whose formal name is 2014 MU69, after using the Hubble Space Telescope to seek out targets for an extended mission.<\/p>\n
Seven scientific instruments were reprogrammed to observe Ultima Thule and its environment. In the hours before the flyby, radio signals were beamed from Earth toward the spacecraft in hopes of getting reflected readings relating to Ultima\u2019s composition. Imagers and spectrometers captured hundreds of photos as the spacecraft buzzed within 2,200 miles of the 20-mile-wide agglomeration of ice and rock, at a relative speed of 32,000 mph. Other instruments monitored the solar wind, energetic particles and dust concentrations in Ultima\u2019s vicinity.<\/p>\n
Unlike Pluto, which is a billion miles closer in, Ultima Thule is thought to be relatively unchanged since the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the most primitive object ever encountered by a spacecraft,\u201d mission project scientist Hal Weaver said in advance of the flyby.<\/p>\n
But mission managers acknowledged that they didn\u2019t know exactly what New Horizons would send back. \u201cAnything\u2019s possible,\u201d deputy project scientist John Spencer said.<\/p>\n
A highly processed image, acquired 37 hours before the flyby, showed a fuzzy view of what appeared to be an elongated object that\u2019s been compared to a peanut. Progressively better images should be released starting on New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
The New Horizons team is expected to receive a 15-minute \u201cPhone Home\u201d transmission that reports the health of the spacecraft and all its instruments at about 10 a.m. ET (7 a.m. PT). That will be followed by an 11:30 a.m. ET (8:30 a.m. PT) news conference, during which team leaders will share findings that were sent back to Earth before the time of closest approach. Those findings should include a processed version of six-pixel imagery that shows Ultima\u2019s shape more definitively.<\/p>\n
The first images and other science data from the close flyby itself are to be shared at a news conference on Wednesday, and even higher-fidelity results will be released on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Because of the power limits for New Horizons\u2019 transmitter, plus the extreme distances involved, the spacecraft will be sending back data at a rate of only 1,000 bits per second. New Horizons\u2019 mission managers figure it will take 20 months to send back the roughly 6 gigabytes of science data that the spacecraft should have stored in its memory banks during the encounter.<\/p>\n
The New Horizons mission is a partnership involving NASA as well as the Applied Physics Laboratory, which is in charge of mission operations; and the Southwest Regional Institute, which is Stern\u2019s home institution. Because APL manages the mission on NASA\u2019s behalf, the partial government shutdown hasn\u2019t had a major impact on operations. However, NASA representatives on the team either had to get special authorization or sit out this week\u2019s proceedings.<\/p>\n
One NASA official who did get the go-ahead to take part was Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen, who heads the space agency\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. During one of tonight\u2019s pre-flyby panels, he noted that NASA was spending $6 billion over the course of a decade on missions targeting small celestial bodies, including Ultima Thule as well as an assortment of asteroids.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, that\u2019s why I\u2019m here,\u201d he told the crowd at APL. \u201cTo show that presence, to really be here for these missions as we do these very challenging maneuvers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zurbuchen may well have yet another mission to juggle: In the months ahead, Stern and his colleagues hope to start laying plans for yet another New Horizons extension, to target another Kuiper Belt object that\u2019s yet to be identified. And another party will no doubt be part of the plans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Hundreds of well-wishers took part in a different kind of New Year\u2019s countdown, 33 minutes past midnight, to celebrate the moment when NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past an icy object known as Ultima Thule, more than 4 billion miles away. The revelers here at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2337,2173,190,4809,2174,4810,2937],"class_list":["post-18205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-2014-mu69","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-nasa","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe","tag-ultima-thule"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}