That’s great! You can see the docking ring, thruster burns on the shuttle, and photon torpedo tubes on the mother ship!
Aww, nice!! Thanks!!
Note the comment in the caption. “It will take almost two years for New Horizons to transmit all the data from the flyby, 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.”
Reminds me of a YouTube video where someone used a 56k US Robotics modem to (start) the download of a web page. It was a proof of concept and only about eight minutes so not much actually got in before the video reached its end.
Here’s another story. I found it while looking at the link about the duck-billed dinosaur thingy.
http://www.sci-news.com/space/detailed-image-ultima-thule-06848.html
And of this Board!
I keep trying to imagine what Ultima Thule would have been like leading up to the time when the two bodies first contacted each other. It would have taken a long time, in human terms, for the orbiting pair to radiate away their kinetic energy while growing gradually closer. There must have been many years, or millennia, when the space between them was smaller than their diameters, or when it was less than a mile, less than a hundred feet, even less than a meter. There would have been a tiny gap you could see through for many human lifetimes, and it would have been attracting any loose bits that were able to roll around or creep into position. Meanwhile, though the two bodies probably became gravitationally locked to one another well before any contact, perhaps there was still substantial libration in both bodies until they touched. Imagine lying on one body looking at the other when they were 1000 meters apart, or 100, or 10. It would have filled the entire sky. I guess it would have slowly moved around due to liberation. And you’d be nearly weightless, especially if you were lying on the smaller one. Well, you’d feel dead, of course, and cold, but still…
Any loose material on the bodies would assume the shape of the Roche lobes, and in the process of assuming that shape, convert a lot of orbital energy into heat. The coalescence would proceed faster and faster as they got closer, and the time when they were very close but not quite yet touching would be very brief.
The latest image was taken at 4200 miles, and closest approach was 2200 miles. So we’ll see better yet.
Is there enough light that far out for human eyes to see anything like that?
(Aside from the “being cold and dead” thing, of course.)
Sunlight at that distance a couple of thousand times dimmer than noonday sun at Earth, couple of hundred times brighter than full moon.
Just to add to that - Sunlight is roughly 100,000 lux. An overcast day is only about 1000 lux, Normal indoor lighting ranges from 100 to 1000 lux, and a full moon is about .1 lux. We have no trouble seeing in full moonlight. Our eyes have a massive range of brightness sensitivity.
100 times brighter than a full moon would be about 10 lux, Which is about the brightness of normal twilight on Earth. If you were on Ultima Thule, the brightness level would be like an evening just after sunset on Earth. Perfectly usable. If your eyes are good, you could read in that much light.
If I am recalling right there is no auto-aiming capability on the craft so programmers had to set the cameras panning movements beforehand. There was an quick check on the as yet not downloaded data and they are cherry picking the frames that actually captured U-T to download first.*
Pretty awesome, I’d say.
*I have no idea how this was determined. The misses are zeroes (black), I suppose.
I expect to see “NCC 1701” pretty soon.
Cool.
And in terms of apparent size, the sun would be just a pinpoint, not much different than a star except much brighter, the sort of thing we never see from earth. Kind of like one of those small but annoyingly bright and glaring LEDs.
The resemblance is beginning to be rather striking!
It’s rather amazing how much we can misconstrue the shape of an object based on superficial observations and incorrect assumptions. Something to keep in mind when looking at artists’ renderings of famous interstellar object Oumuamua, which are based on so little observational data that they’re almost entirely speculative. The shape of the thing could be almost anything.*
- And the antennas, hatches, and high-powered telescopes and death rays on board would be entirely invisible to us!
I read the new shape article several days ago.
Now when I look at a pic I can’t help but see the larger one as more flattened.
Perception is influenced by preconception.
Another image released: here