
NASA’s New Horizons Team Strikes Gold in Argentina - rbanffy
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-horizons-team-strikes-gold-in-argentina
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__x0x__
That is tremendous, thanks for sharing. Congratulations to all the New
Horizons folks! I look forward to our upcoming fly-by of the object that
caused the occultation. With five different observations of the occultation I
would imagine that they will be able to get some decent information on the
size/shape of the object.

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zitterbewegung
I have seen the transit of Venus but to see this a team find an occlusion that
only occurs for milliseconds is is awe inspiring! Congrats to the people who
made this happen!

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rodiger
> "A primitive solar system object that’s more four billion miles (6.5 billion
> kilometers) away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth." Did
> they forget a "than" after "more" and before "four"? Or is it "a mere"?

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gordon_freeman
should have been "more than". "Mere" does not make sense with a huge figure
such as "four billion miles" IMO.

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lomnakkus
I think "mere" kind of makes sense at these scales? I mean the nearest known
star (Proxima Centauri) is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. (Guess it depends on
whether you're using "American" Billions or not...)

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greglindahl
Given that you're talking about an object in our solar system, I think almost
all astronomers would not use "mere" or parsecs.

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lomnakkus
Ah, missed the "in our solar system" bit :).

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valuearb
Reading this I wondered that if NASA's New Horizon's team had actually struck
gold, could they use the money in their budget to do more Kuiper Belt probes?

Or would it be diverted to the Shelby Launch System?

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amingilani
For a moment there, I was wondering what NASA was doing prospecting for gold
in Argentina.

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weberc2
Can someone explain why they had to set up a temporary telescope in Argentina
to get data from a probe? If the article explained it, I missed that part.

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Canada
They used Earth based telescopes to find a more accurate information about
MU69. In order for New Horizons to get good pictures they need to know exactly
where it is, how big it is, and how reflective it is.

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weberc2
Ah, thank you for clearing that up.

