New Horizons Sails Through & # 039; Final Exam & # 039; Before Last Thule Encounter

New Horizons Sails Through & # 039; Final Exam & # 039; Before Last Thule Encounter

New Horizons Sails Through & # 039; Final Exam & # 039; Before Last Thule Encounter





New Horizons Sails Through 'Final Exam' Before Last Thule Encounter






                    


An artistic illustration of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flying by Ultima Thule (officially known as 2014 MU69) on January 1, 2019. Recent observations suggest that Ultima Thule may actually be two bodies in orbit.

                    Credit: Steve Gribben / JHUAPL / SwRI




		POT New Horizons Mission continues to mark the milestones before his historic New Year's journey of the distant object known as Ultima Thule.

		Last month, the mission team conducted a three-day practice session for the flyby, downloading and analyzing simulated data and rehearsing how to present this information to the public and the press.  

		"This was the final exam for our science team, and they passed it very successfully, which means we are ready for the Ultima flyby to arrive in almost 100 days from now." New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

He[[Destiny Pluto: the mission of the new horizons of NASA in images] 

		This science and communication test, conducted between September 6 and September 8 at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, was one of the last two dozen "operational readiness tests" that the team He has been doing it in advance. of the January 1 flyby, mission officials said.

		The simulated flyby data that the team devised represent Ultima Thule as two objects surrounded by a thin ring of debris. Actual observations may show something similar; The limited information that astronomers have compiled to date suggests that Ultimate Thule, which is officially known as 2014, may consist of two bodies orbiting around a common center of mass.

		Astronomers think that Ultima Thule is approximately 23 miles (37 kilometers) wide. The distant and mysterious object is about a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, which was New Horizons' first overflight target. On July 14, 2015, the probe zoomed in less than 7,800 miles (12,550 km) from the dwarf planet. Impressive images of a complex world. with towering mountains of ice and water and vast plains of frozen nitrogen and other exotic ice creams.





						


Team members of the New Horizons mission (from left) Kirby Runyon, Rajani Dhingra, Mallory Kinczyk and Kelsi Singer discuss the two main objects of the simulated Ultima Thule system. 

            						    Credit: NASA / Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University / Southwest Research Institute / Henry Throop 


		The encounter with Ultima Thule is the centerpiece of the extended mission of New Horizons, and the flyby should also return some surprising data. The current plan calls for the spacecraft to zoom in at only 2,200 miles (3,540 km) from Ultima Thule, which astronomers regard as a pristine relic of the planetary formation period of the solar system.

		"New Horizons is already making the first close flyby of a small object in the Kuiper Belt, an incredible feat in itself," said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver of APL. the same statement. (The Kuiper Belt is the ring of icy objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune). "But if the Ultima real is half as cool as the one we simulated in this test, we expect an even more startling start to 2019!"



	Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall Y Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published in Space.com.



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