How NASA Glimpsed The Mysterious Object 'New Horizons' Will Reach In 2019 (popsci.com) 68
necro81 writes: After its successful flyby of Pluto in July 2015, the New Horizons probe received a mission extension to fly past a Kuiper Belt object -- named 2014 MU69 -- in January 2019. However, we know few details about the object -- its size, shape, albedo, whether it has any companions -- which are crucial for planning the flyby. Based on observations from Hubble, the New Horizons team knew that the object would pass in front of a star -- an occultation -- on July 17th, which could provide some of this data. But the occultation would last for less than a second, would only be visible in Patagonia, and the star itself is quite dim.
NASA set up 24 telescopes near one community to capture the event, and received lots of cooperation from locals: turning off streetlights, shutting down a nearby highway, and setting up trucks as windbreaks. At least five of those telescopes captured the occultation. This was the latest in a series of observations ahead of the flyby.
"We had to go up to farmers' doors and say 'Hi, we're here from NASA, we're wondering if we can set up telescopes in your back pasture?'" one astronomer told Popular Science. "More often than not people were like 'that sounds awesome, sure, we'll help out!'"
NASA set up 24 telescopes near one community to capture the event, and received lots of cooperation from locals: turning off streetlights, shutting down a nearby highway, and setting up trucks as windbreaks. At least five of those telescopes captured the occultation. This was the latest in a series of observations ahead of the flyby.
"We had to go up to farmers' doors and say 'Hi, we're here from NASA, we're wondering if we can set up telescopes in your back pasture?'" one astronomer told Popular Science. "More often than not people were like 'that sounds awesome, sure, we'll help out!'"
Nibiru (Score:1)
Most likely.
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Re: Nibiru (Score:2)
Why would you think that?
Re:Slashdotters are already familiar with... (Score:5, Funny)
... objects that they can't see but trust are there
Like their toes?
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I was going to suggest a different appendage.
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Evidence that contradicts climate change, I suppose. ;)
Would be great to know what the odds are on New Horizons finding an object like this. Things get very dilute in the outer solar system.
It's creimer's ebooks (Score:1)
We tried to put them as far away as possible, but NO, you had to go look for them!
good stuff (Score:1)
The fact that people rose to the occasion is uplifting in itself.
Lets hope the data leads to some good observations in 2019!
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It depends. Imagine NASA doing that in some states (which shall go unmentioned) in the U.S. Fox News (sic) would claim it was an advance program by the "deep state" to steal something or other, any made up treasure will do. Now if the Russians offered to do it, Fox News would claim it was an opening to an new era in scientifical cooperation leading to a greater understanding of Hillary and Benghazi.
2014 MU69 (Score:1)
That's my password!
Cool story (Score:2, Funny)
Now tell me the one about how cmdrtaco spotted uranus.
Old school (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what we used to do back in the old days when you wanted to set up your telescope in some rural area, away from the city lights, for a night's viewing. Ask for and get permission, and maybe have a pleasant conversation with a farmer who thinks what you're doing is really cool.
Nowadays people just fly their drone over someone's property unannounced, then act like they're the one whose rights were violated when the property owner shoots it down.
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Tibetans need the jobs more than Hawaiians do anyway.
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That's sorta what I was thinking, that in a lot of South America people are used to 'exchanging favors' with government officials so they are more then happy to work with someone from the government/police/etc; thinking that it will pay off down the line.
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They aren't anti-science, they are tired of having people come in and stomp on them. Like the Indians at Standing Rock, they are fighting back now. Deal with it.
Does the title have meaning? (Score:2)
Or is it just a jumble of words?
Headline Sense Not Make (Score:2, Offtopic)
"How NASA Glimpsed The Mysterious Object THAT 'New Horizons' Will Reach In 2019"
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Which.
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Disagree
Are you saying you disagree, or telling me to disagree?
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If you're able to work out that it needs a "that," then you don't really need the "that."
There's good news and bad news (Score:5, Funny)
The good news: They got info on the object
The bad news: It appears to be metallic in composition, and it is almost perfectly spherical except for a large parabolic dish embedded just above the equator.
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The bad news: Its mass is roughly 1/4th of the moon and its slowing down, sir.
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Obligatory: Construction Shack [simak-bibliography.com] by Clifford D. Simak.
(Read the ending [lingualeo.com] for the most relevant part, or enjoy it from the beginning [lingualeo.com]).
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Then it's no Death Star; the trench run was not done in the equatorial trench, but rather a smaller 'north-south' trench.
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Yeah, but that schematic also had the dish on the equatorial trench. Fake news!
Re:There's good news and bad news (Score:4, Funny)
Citizen Scientists (Score:1)
There is actually a decent amount of work available to citizen scientists in this field. If you're at all interested, I suggest going to http://www.lunar-occultations.com/iota/iotandx.htm and reading up on what you need for timing an occultation.
Not enough orbital telescopes (Score:5, Interesting)
This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits. Instead of building more broken-by-design warplanes, we should be designing the next generation Hubble telescope. And no, the Webb telescope isn't a Hubble. Different frequencies. And, and this part is important, we should build eight copies of it, not just one, and send them to the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Sun and each of Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. (The Venus variant will be somewhat cheaper, 'cause we can skimp on solar panels.) Then we either need big fat radio telescopes at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, with multiple independent large antenna arrays, or we need to perfect laser data transmission in free space at solar system scales. I'm not sure which is smaller, a radio antenna array or the optics required to handle laser communication. I'm guessing the laser, since the frequencies are so much higher. If we have enough telescopes leading or following enough of the planets, we can use them as a network to bounce data around the Sun as necessary.
Let me be clear. I want so much incoming data that storing it all will prop up the hard drive manufacturing industry for a decade, because storing it all in flash memory would be too expensive. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start having NSA-style problems while looking for interesting things in an ocean of bytes. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start training neural nets as to what constitutes "interesting" and turning them loose on the ocean of bytes, because there isn't enough grad student slave labor to look at it all. I want astronomers to have a reason to hire engineers away from Google, because they have exa-scale data problems to deal with. I want all that and I'm not even an astronomer.
I just think it would be nice to have a proper map of the solar system we live in.
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These budgetary priorities only address the wants of whites and do not address the serious problems facing communities of people of color. Always ask, who benefits? If the answer is "only whites", then it's a bad idea.
Knowing where all the flying rocks are benefits every living thing on Earth, including voles. You're not prejudiced against voles are you?
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Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to
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Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to coincide with the shadow track of this miniscule object at just the right moment.
No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them. If you already have approximate ephemera, it's easy enough to run the equations eight more times, not just for Earth. You also have a great many more useful choices of source light, since the space based telescopes don't have to contend with being portable (at least not conventionally) or with Earth's atmosphere.
Depending on where the planets are at the time, you may
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No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them.
Because there are lots and lots of occultations available to pick from, and NASA went to Patagonia because it wanted a junket there?
If it were just a matter of "picking a star" then the occultation could have been observed at any random ground based observatory. In fact even in Patagonia that could not tell which telescope would be in the correct position. The fact that this does not work on Earth should tip you off that your proposal is nonsensical. Being "in space" does not change the occultation odds.
The
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This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits.
Why? Because a few people had to lug a few boxes to Patagonia? I think that was probably a lot cheaper than putting a telescope in orbit.
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This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits.
Why? Because a few people had to lug a few boxes to Patagonia? I think that was probably a lot cheaper than putting a telescope in orbit.
Because to make a map of the solar system, the process has to be repeated many many times. Current best estimates are that there are around 35,000 Kuiper Belt objects larger than 100km in diameter, and there could be 100 million total objects of detectable size. Lugging boxes to Patagonia helped pin down one of those objects.
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When is mapping Kuiper Belt objects going to be useful information?
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When is mapping Kuiper Belt objects going to be useful information?
Immediately. There's a theory that comets are Kuiper Belt objects whose orbits have been disturbed. Even if they're not originally Kuiper Belt objects, cometary orbits often extend will into the Kuiper Belt, and are therefore subject to possibly significant gravitational influence. Knowing a major comet's orbit has changed because of a close flyby with a Kuiper Belt object may be the difference between predicting a collision with Earth 70 years in the future vs 3 days in the future. I think the addition
Path of occultation (Score:3)
(The folks at SWRI are the principle investigators for the New Horizons mission.)
The title.. can punctuation halp? (Score:1)