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Astronomers observe occultation of next New Horizons flyby target
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:21 pm
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:21 pm
LINK
Pretty neat, they observed the Kuiper Belt Object MU69 passing in front of a star which helps give them data for the New Horizons flyby in about 17 months.
(486958) 2014 MU69
Pretty neat, they observed the Kuiper Belt Object MU69 passing in front of a star which helps give them data for the New Horizons flyby in about 17 months.
(486958) 2014 MU69
quote:
Having completed its flyby of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft has been maneuvered for a flyby of 2014 MU69, which will occur on 31 December 2018 or 1 January 2019, at which point it will be 43.4 AU from the Sun in the constellation Sagittarius.[18][19][20][21] 2014 MU69 is the first object to be targeted for a flyby that was discovered after the spacecraft was launched.[7]
This post was edited on 7/19/17 at 7:35 pm
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:22 pm to DavidTheGnome
I don't know what any of this means, but I know it's cool
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:28 pm to GEAUXT
A primitive solar system object that’s more than four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth. Just before midnight Eastern Time Sunday (12:50 a.m. local time July 17), several telescopes deployed by the New Horizons team in a remote part of Argentina were in precisely the right place at the right time to catch its fleeting shadow — an event that’s known as an occultation.
In a matter of seconds, NASA’s New Horizons team captured new data on its elusive target, an ancient Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69. Weary but excited team members succeeded in detecting the spacecraft’s next destination, in what’s being called the most ambitious and challenging ground occultation observation campaign in history.
“So far we have five confirmed occultations,” said Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, holding up five fingers as New Horizons scientists pored over the exhilarating initial data. Buie led a team of more than 60 observers who battled high winds and cold to set up a “picket fence” of 24 mobile telescopes in a remote region of Chubut and Santa Cruz, Argentina. Their goal: to spot the shadow of the mysterious Kuiper Belt object (KBO) where New Horizons will fly by on New Year’s Day 2019 – to better understand its size, shape, orbit and the environment around it. Before these observations, only the Hubble Space Telescope successfully detected MU69, and even it had not been able to determine MU69’s size or shape.
In a matter of seconds, NASA’s New Horizons team captured new data on its elusive target, an ancient Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69. Weary but excited team members succeeded in detecting the spacecraft’s next destination, in what’s being called the most ambitious and challenging ground occultation observation campaign in history.
“So far we have five confirmed occultations,” said Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, holding up five fingers as New Horizons scientists pored over the exhilarating initial data. Buie led a team of more than 60 observers who battled high winds and cold to set up a “picket fence” of 24 mobile telescopes in a remote region of Chubut and Santa Cruz, Argentina. Their goal: to spot the shadow of the mysterious Kuiper Belt object (KBO) where New Horizons will fly by on New Year’s Day 2019 – to better understand its size, shape, orbit and the environment around it. Before these observations, only the Hubble Space Telescope successfully detected MU69, and even it had not been able to determine MU69’s size or shape.
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:54 pm to DavidTheGnome
So you're saying it's...
Posted on 7/19/17 at 7:58 pm to DavidTheGnome
I don't believe any of this..... put it in the dinosaur files
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