Mars will kill you

More space news - watch for Comet 46P on Sunday night

https://www.slashgear.com/look-to-the-sky-sunday-to-see-the-years-brightest-comet-14557925/

 

Here's a short video of the Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two spaceflight yesterday

 

Far Out

https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-just-discovered-farout-the-most-distant-kn-1831152968

 

Ultima Thule is the furthest thing we've ever visited. 6 billion kilometers and 13 years to take some photos. It might be the best thing about this New Years holiday.

https://www.rt.com/news/447697-new-horizons-ultima-thule/

 

Kizmet beat me to an Ultima Thule post.

This is the first Kuiper belt object that a spacecraft has visited. Nobody is sure what it will look like. Preliminary indications are that it seems kind of peanut shaped, and may end up being two small objects in contact (fused?) or orbiting each other very closely. (I want it to be a derelict alien starship!) More realistically, it will be interesting to learn something about what these far outer solar system objects are composed of. Rock? Ice (which behaves and functions like rock way out there)? Will they be able to get any data about possible organic chemistry on its surface?

Unclear how much viewers will initially be able to see on the live feeds. This thing is way out beyond forsaken and unloved former-planet Pluto. (With a giant heart on its side, it remains every child's favorite. They identify with it.) Not only will there be a speed-of-light delay in the signals arriving here, I believe that the data transmission rate is low so it will take some time to download data and photos. So the juicy details might not be made public immediately. Apparently the plan is for the spacecraft to blurt that it is awake and recording as it passes its target, then 4 to 5 hours later when it's done observing it will reorient to point its high-gain antenna at Earth and begin transmitting high-res photos and stuff.

NASA will have coverage (live panel discussions with scientists, Q&As and live updates) here (see the schedule):

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

And there will also be a stream from Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel MD (where the mission is being controlled) here (dunno if these are the same events that NASA will have on its stream, I imagine so):

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Where-to-Watch.php

There will be (and currently are) quick updates appearing on New Horizons' various twitter pages too:

https://twitter.com/nasanewhorizons

https://twitter.com/JHUAPL

https://twitter.com/plutoport

More here

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Speculations on what Ultima Thule's shape might be from a Cal Tech postdoc here:

https://twitter.com/jtuttlekeane/status/1079088958989062150

 

Here's a list of space events on tap for the coming year, kind of biased towards events early in the year:

New Years night (US time) -- NASA's New Horizons performs a flyby of Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule. (See the other post.)

January 3 -- The Chinese Chang'e 4 lunar lander is scheduled to attempt a landing on the far side of the Moon.

January 17 -- Unmanned SpaceX Crew Dragon test flight. (Demonstration Mission 1 - DM1)

January 31 -- India's Chandryaan - 2 lunar lander will attempt a landing near the Moon's south pole, releasing a rover that will snoop around and look for water ice.

Early February -- The Insight Mars lander will commence its boring boring, hoping to place sensors at least 16 feet down.

February 12 -- NASA's Juno spacecraft will perform another close-range Jupiter flyby, hopefully returning more of those surrealistic photos of chaotic Jovian weather (kind of like a real life Mandlebrot set).

February 13 -- Israeli private startup SpaceIL will try to land its own lunar lander (lunar landers seem to be the happening thing this coming year) with SpaceX launching it atop a Falcon 9.

Late February -- Japan's Hayabusa 3 may try to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu. (The vehicle is nearby and has been looking for a suitable site).

March -- Unmanned test flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule.

March -- Another SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, this one carrying a heavy communications satellite.

April 4 -- Parker Solar probe perhelion (closest approach to the Sun for a while, its still adjusting its orbit).

April -- Elon Musk has been teasing a possible first flight for SpaceX's currently-under-construction test-hopper Starship prototype, designed to ascend up to a few thousand feet, hover and then propulsively descend for engineering tests. ('Starship' is the new name for the huge upper-stage spaceship portion of the 'BFR'. It's as big as a navy frigate, capable of carrying a hundred people to Mars.) I kind of doubt it will be this early but Elon suggests that it might be.

June -- First SpaceX manned spaceflight using a Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon. Two NASA astronauts are currently training for that mission. I'm personally guessing that with manned spaceflights in the offing, SpaceX might delay the Starship test-hopper so that the company can concentrate all of its attention and resources on safely becoming a manned spaceflight program.

August -- If all goes well, the second SpaceX manned flight, this one will dock with the Space Station.

October-November -- The European Space Agency's Cheops exoplanet-hunting satellite is set to launch to join NASA's TESS which is already doing similar work. (Can't hurt to have two of them.)

Somewhere during the year Blue Origin is likely to fly its first manned flight of its New Shepherd suborbital rocket and Virgin Galactic will almost certainly fly its rocket plane again, probably several times. It might even start flying space tourists (Richard Branson wants to be the first of those).

 

While everyone is paying attention to New Horizons' arrival at Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, Osiris Rex will be completing a very delicate thruster burn lasting a few seconds that put it into a gravitational orbit of tiny Bennu (only 500 meters across). It's going to be the smallest object that a spacecraft has ever orbited.

https://twitter.com/KinetXSNAFD/status/1079618761236205568

While orbital velocity on Earth is about 18,000 mph, Osiris Rex will be orbiting Bennu at the blistering pace of 0.13 mph (6 cm/sec), relative to Bennu.

https://twitter.com/KinetXSNAFD/status/1079787073765167105

 

I love watching new discoveries unfolding in real time! This is Real distance learning!

New Horizons is six light hours from Earth, so data on what it did last night (our time) is only now trickling in. Besides the relativistic delay, data transmission rates by weak radio from that little vehicle so far away is slow. (I imagine that there are all kinds of error-correcting codes too.) Imagine that little bar creeping along agonizingly slowly as you download something.

Jonathan McDowell seems to have access to the raw information almost as fast as NASA is receiving it and is translating it on his twitter page.

He says, "Signal received! And now in lock with telemetry. NH is alive... now to download system status.

RF (radio system) is green - all good there. Thermal state also good.

What's "FC"? - flight control maybe? But what does that include in that context?

GNC (Guidance, Nav and Control) and Propulsion and (electrical) Power green.

C&DH - command and data handling - good, the disk drive is pointing where it should be. The "SSR" is solid state recorder, which is basically a solid-state disk drive. It has 'pointers' which say how full the disk is. The fact that those pointers are where they are meant to be means that the expected number of files have been written to the drive.

Now they just have to copy the contents of the drive to a computer on Earth - sort of like doing a backup! That'll only take them about 2 years, to copy the full drive... but we'll get some data later today.

I'm told FC is probably flight computer. also "Planning" was green, which means they think NH actually used the right instruments in the right order for the right amount of time. So, everything looks good.

The one thing we don't yet green from yet is Navigation... and we don't know for sure if Ultima Thule is actually in any of the pictures. So still a few hours to be a bit nervous."

https://twitter.com/planet4589

Edit: Jonathan McDowell's source for the above seems to be this video, originally played live on NASA TV and JHUAPL about an hour or two ago, showing the system status data first coming in and the various systems desks reporting their status. The data starts to arrive about 30 minutes into the video so you can skip forward to that.



Jonathan McDowell has gotten hold of this pre-encounter photograph of Ultima Thule apparently taken by LORRI (who is New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) as New Horizons was still approaching and blown up mercilessly (it's very pixilated) that shows that the object is very elongated. He speculates that it might be two objects in close proximity (a 'binary').

Some additional commentary on that photograph from the Planetary Society here

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2019/new-horizons-mu69-flyby-success.html

(I still want it to be a derelict alien starship floating out there, perhaps with a propulsion unit and a habitation unit, connected by a thin neck.)

 

Six light-hours would seem to be 1/1,460'th of a light-year.

I mentioned in post #45 that New Horizons was scheduled to blurt out that it's alive and kicking as it passed Ultima Thule, then would aim its high-gain antenna at Earth several hours later and begin downloading photos and stuff. I think that the systems report in the post above is the contents of the earlier blurt. The scientific, as opposed to engineering, stuff is still to come.

 

New Horizons has its own music video!



...by former Queen guitarist Brian May, who happens to have a PhD in astrophysics! (From Imperial College, not too shabby.)

 

Photos coming in: What the astronomers call a 'contact binary'.

 

Yeah, a peanut, or maybe a snowman

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/681591405/images-reveal-a-snowman-at-the-frigid-outer-reaches-of-our-solar-system

 

Rumors are swirling that the Chinese Chang'e-4 lunar landing attempt is currently underway, but no official confirmation yet.
(I guess that they don't do live-feeds like SpaceX and NASA.)

https://twitter.com/Yeqzids

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI

Edit: CCTV, the Chinese state news/propaganda network is apparently now reporting a successful lunar landing.

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1080675599331540992

The US NASA Administrator is congratulating China, so I guess that it's confirmed.

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1080678873422016513

 

K2-288Bb - Lets go surfing!

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-planet-found-using-data-from-nasa-kepler-telescope-2019-1

 

Because I know you all fell in love with our little celestial peanut, here's some pictures

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-new-horizons-space-probe-sharpest-image-of-ultima-thule/

 

It may be the end for the Opportunity Rover

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/mars-opportunity-rover.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage

 

You never know what you are going to find on the internet!

I was looking at an astronaut twitter page. He linked to a story in an entertainment magazine about the possibility of filming real science fiction movies in space, with professional actors, cinematographers and everything. (Hey, the day's coming...) And that story contained a link to this...

It's the first science fiction movie filmed in space, on the space station. (Mostly.) The actors, camera-man etc are astronauts. It sounds like they are just making up their lines as they go. I liked "You're upside down! No, you're upside down! Stop walking on the ceiling, you're creeping me out!" (It must get boring up there.)

They say that the film took about as long to shoot as to watch, less then five minutes. One take, no rehearsals.

It's pretty stupid, but it's film history. Watch it here.

 

It's a heroic little thing.

Along with its twin rover Spirit, it landed on Mars in January 2004. At the time their design lifetime on Mars was three months and the engineers just hoped that they would go a few hundred yards.

But they proved to be the Energizer Bunnies of rovers and just kept going and going and going...

Spirit finally got stuck in a sand-trap in 2010 and died after 6 years on Mars, but Opportunity kept rolling.

It's been 15 years and it's covered some 28 miles.

As one of the project engineers said, if Opportunity has finally died, it's certainly an honorable death. As the military says, conduct above and beyond...

 

It’s a tribute to the engineers that built the little guy

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/planetary-rovers-are-we-alone