New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190102

by mbrundle • 8 years ago

697 143 8 years ago

pluto.jhuapl.edu

mbrundle• 8 years ago

I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?

jameskilton• 8 years ago

Actually doing the fly-by is less impressive (the fly-by was planned and programmed a while ago) than the fact that we were able to line up Horizons to an object like this at all!

https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1077986070128668674

weavie• 8 years ago

I find it more impressive and awe inspiring that stuff in space is so predictable that we can actually program the fly by such a long time in advance and get such a high degree of accuracy.

hcrisp• 8 years ago

I searched for "New Horizons GNC" and this link came up [1]. "The AOCS/GNC (Attitude and Orbital Control System / Guidance Navigation and Control) subsystem takes care that a spacecraft points to a specific point in space, determines the s/c attitude, and does trajectory corrections."

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9556/how-does-new-...

ilkkao• 8 years ago

In the press conference they said that the spacecraft tried to take one megapixel image of Ultima Thule one hour after this image. Interesting to see it in couple months.

tabtab3• 8 years ago

It will be a giant blurry thumb, just like my vacation photos. Except maybe green and glowing this time.

gibolt• 8 years ago

For a more detailed summary of the amazing collaborations necessary and challenges faced, Scott Manley: https://youtu.be/ymJRlUQfPfQ

macleginn• 8 years ago

They actually managed to predict the bi-lobed shape by keeping track of when the shadow of the object swept different points on the Earth’s surface. Amazing.

dekhn3• 8 years ago

the development of double precision floating point, and the kalman algorithm, were two major improvements. Basically there is a computer at JPL that, given a location in the solar system and a current location of a ship, will give you instructions on when to burn. After you burn fuel to move, you update based on visual locations of known stars, fit a model, and do incremental burns until convergence.

The book Digital Apollo touches on a wide range of issues associated with building systems that can do this.

karmakaze• 8 years ago

the development of double precision floating point

So refreshing to hear that a double is good enough for JPL when repeatedly told it's not good enough for mere dollars and cents.

lisper9• 8 years ago

photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec

Not to detract at all from the astonishing technical achievement, but that's the wrong comparison. You can see the ISS with your naked eye, and it's a <1 mile object flying past at 4.8 miles/sec. The right comparison is with the distance at which this photo was taken: 18,000 miles, or about half an hour from closest approach.

Actually, the right comparison is of the closest approach distance (~2000 miles) with the distance from earth (4,000,000,000 miles). That's like launching a missile from Los Angeles to New York and hitting your target to within a meter.

jdmichal• 8 years ago

To be fair, while that's an accurate representation of the distances, it's not accurate of the difficulty. They don't have to deal with unpredictable atmosphere. There's reasons laser-guided missiles are about 1-2 meters-ish of accuracy with constant guidance, while we can basically fire-and-forget spacecraft to 4 billion miles away.

kamaal3• 8 years ago

>That's like launching a missile from Los Angeles to New York and hitting your target to within a meter.

As long you have navigation(GPS) and fuel(to make adjustments), that shouldn't be a problem?

But of course you don't have a map in space, so how do you navigate, and course correct etc, is another big puzzle in itself.

dwc• 8 years ago

The right comparison is with the distance at which this photo was taken: 18,000 miles, or about half an hour from closest approach.

Implicit in this statement: the camera was pointing close to the direction of travel and the target wasn't moving much within the field of view. Hugely easier than trying to image from the side at closest approach, which at best would have given a smeared image and at worst a complete miss.

It's still impressive and awesome. But always try to skew the odds of success in your favor when dealing with stuff like this. You have one pass and then the opportunity is gone.

tabtab3• 8 years ago

Re: able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec...Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision?

I cannot speak for this probe, but other probes have made the probe itself or camera boom move slightly to compensate for the target moving relative to the probe. It's kind of like moving your head back and forth to follow a tennis match if your eyes alone have difficulty tracking.

The object looks like BB-8. We'll get even better pics in the coming weeks.

ohiovr• 8 years ago

Not to mention seeing it in practically pitch black darkness

jimijazz• 8 years ago

This is why I love HN: because I can count to have updated links to content I care for.

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

And I logged in a few mins ago just to post this, but I am happy to see the community is like-minded!!

scrumbledober2• 8 years ago

I've been getting most of my updates for this from /r/space personally, but I think that's the main attraction of HN for me. I don't need to curate my own list of subreddits to get links to content that interests me, because it's all (mostly) likeminded people on here that are on average interested by the same kind of stuff as me. I find more new interests on here than I ever could on reddit looking through my preconceived list of interests.

deeths3• 8 years ago

Here's a link to the press conference slides: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Press-Conferences/index....

skunkworker• 8 years ago

That is amazing. It reminds me of a snowman or two snowballs frozen together, except it's red not white.

As seen in the combined image. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Galleries/Featured-Images/pics800wid...

kylek• 8 years ago

Reminded me of 67p (albeit that is slightly more rubber-ducky shaped) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasime...

compsciphd• 8 years ago

my caption to the article that I posted to facebook was "do you wanna build a snowman", so I guess thinking along the same lines :)

stcredzero• 8 years ago

It reminds me of a snowman or two snowballs frozen together, except it's red not white.

The 21st century world of asteroid and Kuiper belt colonization is going to be far fluffier and squishier than we thought it would be in 80's Sci-fi!

rhizome• 8 years ago

Comet 67P has a similar shape. I have to wonder if there's something inherent in these flying rocks that causes them to take a dumbbell shape.

antonvs• 8 years ago

The inherent factor is collision, which is what forms most objects like this.

TeMPOraL2• 8 years ago

Huh, given the color photo, it reminded me of a potato. Yes, I really did find a potato looking like this once.

mr_toad• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_snowball

jacquesm• 8 years ago

Absolutely amazing that they nailed the shape so well based on the occlusion data. That is super impressive.

tomerico• 8 years ago

From /r/space:

Image of the occultation profile vs actual shape: https://i.imgur.com/PNh4nmX.png

Each line is the same star viewed from a different point on Earth. They arranged for telescopes in a long line North to South to all observe UT at the same time, just as it was predicted to pass in front of the star. Then they precisely timed the apparent blinks of the star. The North-South offset meant the star bisected UT across different sections for each telescope. Then they just worked out the parallax difference and mapped out the blink times on a chart to see the silhouette.

6nf• 8 years ago

From that pic it looks like they were able to measure accurately to within meters of the actual shape at this distance! That is incredible

quakeguy• 8 years ago

"The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender."

Welded together by gravity, i'm really in awe seeing the, by far, weakest power so lovely at work.

robotrout3• 8 years ago

So, two masses were close enough in relative velocity and vector, that one of them didn't careen off the other one, and instead, allowed the weakest of all known forces to bond them together as they hurtled at high velocity through space.

This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me. I'm not saying it's artificial. That would be even more unlikely, by orders of magnitude. Just saying "Wow!".

hughes• 8 years ago

As this is the first Kuiper Belt Object we've visited, it's hard to draw much about the statistics of the thing.

magduf• 8 years ago

When you think about the vastness of space (even in our own star system), as well as the incredible amount of time involved since the formation of our system, many things that seem statistically unlikely probably become very likely. How many objects are in orbit around the Sun in this system? We probably only know a small fraction of them, since we can't see ones this small very well from this distance, and there could be many more that are even more distant. So really unlikely objects like this could be more common than you think.

theobon• 8 years ago

Contact binaries are fairly common. Expected to make up about 10-15% of NEOs. My layman's understanding of how Kuiper object contact binaries develop is mutual capture during the early life of the solar system and angular momentum decay until they come into contact.

baq• 8 years ago

the comet rosetta visited was quite similar. it's either humanity's dumb luck or those things are more common than previously thought.

ansible• 8 years ago

This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me.

At this mass these bodies are at, they aren't going to crush together from gravity to form a single round body.

However, if you've got two bodies in very similar orbits around the Sun, in close proximity, it doesn't seem incredible to me that they might eventually collide and stick.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

It doesn’t seem unlikely to me. There are many many approach paths that would result in two similar sized objects ending up orbiting each other.

Once they are orbiting each other then it’s just a matter of time for the orbits to decay. In the final, they would be spinning very very fast but would be inching towards each other until they touch.

prewett• 8 years ago

Given the slower speeds in the outer solar system, especially since they will be rotating in the same direction, so the relative speed will be less, I would imagine that contact binaries would be fairly common. And since they are primarily made of ices, the actual contact event should melt the ice, which will then re-solidify since the impact speed is so little.

I don't know if this is how it actually happens, but it gives a mechanism for this being fairly common. The only information I could find was a short wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_binary_(small_Solar_Sy...

deeths3• 8 years ago

If a center of mass begins to aggregate in an area of space, smaller objects may get captured and will move in an elliptical orbit with the forming object at one of the foci of an ellipse. Because the other foci of the ellipse is also fairly stable, it is also a likely point for smaller objects to aggregate into another larger object. Objects forming in pairs can reinforce each other. Over time when the small objects around the two foci have all aggregated, the objects at the foci will fall together due to gravity.

CamperBob22• 8 years ago

Remember, the Moon is covered with the results of astronomical odds.

samstave• 8 years ago

I personally find it amusing and interesting that the physical object, Ultima Thule, looks similar to the Virtual Game logo "Ultima"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/Ultima_Online...

wallace_f• 8 years ago

The nostalgia and innocence and discovry of childhood hit me so hard when I saw that logo

tunnuz• 8 years ago

I feel you.

mhh__• 8 years ago

Quite interested as to by whom/why this was downvoted

high_derivative• 8 years ago

Whenever I see these updates, I am reminded of the three body problem trilogy and its contemplations on space exploration (the parts I enjoyed the most).

Then I get sad because things just take so incredibly long on a stellar scale, and a human life is so short.

ilamont• 8 years ago

The new images — taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach — revealed Ultima Thule as a "contact binary," consisting of two connected spheres.

Are these common in the asteroid belt or as smaller moons of the outer planets?

InclinedPlane2• 8 years ago

As far as we can tell, they are pretty common. But we haven't visited enough objects to have firm statistics.

sizzzzlerz• 8 years ago

Pretty decent resolution of a object 27000 km distant. Has anybody seen the specs on what type of lens NH uses for images like this?

ihattendorf• 8 years ago

It's an 8" Ritchey–Chrétien telescope with a 1024x1024 pixel CCD camera.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/lorri_about.html

azernik3• 8 years ago

This is still nowhere near full resolution - it's at 140 meters per pixel, whereas the camera got 30 meters per pixel. It's going to take a few days to download the full images at 1kbps though.

Avamander2• 8 years ago

Isn't it 1000baud than 1kbps?

ajuc• 8 years ago

We only have 2 examples, but both this and the Rosetta mission object were rubber-duck-shaped. Is this very common?

peter303• 8 years ago

14 missions to comets, 20 to asteroids, and around 50 planetary small moons imaged well enough to see their shapes. Under a hundred miles in diameter many have irregular shapes. I would guess this shape only occurs a few percent of the time.

Wednesdays news conference speculated UT shape is primordial, while the others may have been carved through four billion years of planetary evolution.

InclinedPlane2• 8 years ago

It's pretty common. Based on radar data about 10-15% of Near Earth asteroids (larger than 200 meters) are contact binaries (or contact-binary shaped at least). We don't have enough data on main belt asteroids, trojan asteroids, and especially TNOs/KBOs to say what the percentages look like for those populations but it's a fair likelihood that the proportions are at least as high if not higher among KBOs.

azernik3• 8 years ago

"hi-res" is relative - this is still about 5 times the feature size that was actually captured by the LORRI camera. Going to have to wait at least a few days for the glorious 30m/pixel version.

Avamander2• 8 years ago

Some page wrote that it takes more than a year to get every piece of information about the fly-by.

SubMachineGhost• 8 years ago

Pluto's flyby generated about 8GB of data and it took about 16 months to get all of it downloaded [1], and this data includes more than just the images, and i read somewhere that the Ultima Thule flyby will generate about 6GB of data.

I think the images are the first thing that get downloaded, so it should not take more than a week to get all high res images.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Telecommunication...

azernik3• 8 years ago

20 months, actually.

hyperpallium3• 8 years ago

It's hi-res for a playstation 1.

substantive content: new horizons uses a modified MIPS R3000 CPU (ok, not the PSX's GPU, and not used for everything on NH, but) https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7551365/playstation-cpu-p...

entity345• 8 years ago

Fantastic.

Just one thing: it would be great if NASA dropped imperial units as main units in such articles.

herewulf• 8 years ago

I agree. However, the people that are paying for this mission still use imperial units. Those of them that are paying the most attention would probably agree with us though.

perl4ever4• 8 years ago

US customary units are not imperial units. Many people don't realize, for instance, that MPG is not comparable between the US and the UK because gallons are substantially different.

perl4ever4• 8 years ago

I don't think they use imperial units.

ars• 8 years ago

Why? What difference does it make? It's just a unit. It makes exactly 0 difference.

dev_north_east• 8 years ago

Why? It's the same information.

gravy• 8 years ago

Nomenclature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule

11thEarlOfMar• 8 years ago

Can a human jump off of Ultima Thule?

https://xkcd.com/681_large/

jake-low• 8 years ago

Probably not, from the approximate sizes noted in the article it sounds like Ultima Thule is a bit bigger than Diemos, which XCKD says you could escape with a bicycle and a ramp.

And just for fun, I also worked out a best guess for the force between the two "lobes": 1.5 x 10^13 N (assuming Ultima Thule is the same density as our Moon), which is about equal to the (Earth) weight of all the ships in the world. [0]

[0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

gshubert17• 8 years ago

Modeling it as two spheres, one 16 km across the other 12 km, with a density the same as water, its total mass would be about 3*10^15 kg. At a distance of 8 km from the center of mass, the escape velocity [0] would be about 7 meters/second or 16 miles/hour.

But the asymmetry of Ultima Thule means that its gravitational field would be weird. Not like a sphere at all. So the acceleration of gravity and escape velocity would vary a lot from place to place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity

remote_phone• 8 years ago

What an astounding feat!

I remember reading they were going to aim for 2000 miles from Ultima Thule, was the closest approach revised to 18,000 miles?

JshWright• 8 years ago

No, this photo was taken before the closest approach (note the very high sun angle, there's basically no shadows, so the probe was still inside the orbit of UT when the photo was taken). It's going to be another month before we see the closest/highest resolution photos (and years before all the data is downloaded)

ryanmercer• 8 years ago

Um, is that BB-8?

Mimas (and Iaepetus too) really looks like the Death Star and now this thing looks like BB-8.

Ultima Thule-BB-8 comparison: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dv7psG3VYAA8jqa.jpg

Mimas-Death Star comparison: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/575/1*nUxm5MD_2xO5Y9Lorr...

Iaepetus-Death Star comparison: https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/80/750x445/8290...

monster_group• 8 years ago

I highly recommend reading the book Chasing New Horizons by Alan Stern[0]. It is a great insight into years of work it takes to get a mission like New Horizons going. It is a very well written book and I could not put it down until finished.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-New-Horizons-Inside-Mission/d...

Fuzzwah• 8 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation, I was happy to find it available on audible.

sova• 8 years ago

It's a snowman with a snowman for a face! (recursive / fractal structures of the early world) space fern!

microDude• 8 years ago

The lack of craters is interesting.

Rooster61• 8 years ago

Kind of sucks that this is the big first picture that is being published. The LORRI, while an impressive piece of hardware in and of itself, is not built for high detail, close-in shots (although it was used some for the Pluto flyby closeups). That's the job of the Ralph telescope on-board the spacecraft.

It's a neat picture, but I fear that any subsequent pictures will have less impact on the public, as many laymen will say "Meh, saw that the other day on <insert_news_site>. Old news".

I'm really looking forward to the spectacular shots we will get from the close-in imager. New Horizons will be MUCH closer to this object than it was Pluto, so it should really get some fantastic shots of the surface features.

For comparison, just check out the wikipedia pages. They show a pretty solid contrast of the capabilities/uses of the two devices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Reconnaissance_Imag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_(New_Horizons)

pvaldes• 8 years ago

Can't help to mention that several round stones stacked in balance is so artificial that is an 'universal' sign to mark the path in wild remote areas. A typical I was here sign.

New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

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