First picture(s) arrive from New Horizons
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html[^] Festive!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html[^] Festive!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
:thumbsup: very cool indeed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html[^] Festive!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I don’t think the average person, myself included, can ever fully understand the magnitude of this accomplishment. In fact, the quantities involved are so far beyond the human experience, I suspect even the mission scientists and engineers struggle to truly visualize them. First, consider the distance. Assume you wanted to emulate this trip. So, you decide to continually fly round-trip from New York to Sydney, until you equal the distance. Bad news here. It would take over 200,000 round-trip flights. Assuming you fly one leg of this round-trip, every single day, you would be flying for a bit over a thousand years. The good news is that, if you’re willing to wait that long, you’ll save a bit on the trip. At around $200M for the commercial flights, you’d beat the $700M price tag for New Horizons :) Next, consider the navigation. Imagine you fire a bullet moving about 20 times as fast as the average rifle round. Your target is a different fast-moving bullet. Finally, make the problem a bit more difficult by requiring that you ricochet off two other fast-moving bullets on the way. Oh, and don’t forget that distance we talked about earlier. Simple right? Then, consider the engineering. You decide to build a contraption that can accomplish almost all of these goals. Though, at that point you’re “only” aiming at that second bullet. You haven’t decided you’ll ricochet off of it yet. So, you plan and lobby, lobby and plan…for a couple of decades. Then, you get permission (and funding) to actually build the thing. A few years later its built and launched. Yeah! Success, right? Nope, you get to wait, and watch it travel, and wait…for an additional decade. Along the way, you decide that second ricochet would be really cool! You even find another bullet to hit. Finally, decades later, if you’ve got the patience, and are still around, you get to enjoy the payoff. All done right? Maybe. They’re talking about another ricochet and another bullet :) Personally, I am in awe of this accomplishment. And, more, as an engineer myself, the patience it must require to begin a project that might not be completed until after you’re gone. Kudos, NASA! Home run on this one! Now, can we talk about that Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway? Are you sure about it? Can I talk you out of it, please? :)
