
Nasa's New Horizons: Final flyby commands given to distant probe - gpvos
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46699737
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dogma1138
The final command for this part of the mission as no further communications
would be possible until the flyby has been complete and the probe can reorient
itself to call back home, it would take 18 months to get the data back from
New Horizons as its current data rate is 1kbp/s or 2 with induced spin.

This isn’t the end of the mission for NH.

~~~
jcims
>This isn’t the end of the mission for NH.

At ~1:30 in the video interview with Alan Stern he says they have ~20 years of
power in the RTG and 'plenty of fuel' to get around. Sounds like there could
be a lot of science yet to come!!

~~~
reaperducer
_Sounds like there could be a lot of science yet to come!!_

From Wiki: _at Pluto 's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s per
transmitter is expected. Besides the low data rate, Pluto's distance also
causes a latency of about 4.5 hours (one-way)._

Scientists have a lot more patience than I do!

~~~
jcoffland
I wonder if they watch their planet porn arrive one scan line at a time.

~~~
tabtab
I can tell you stories about the days of 300 baud dial-up modems.

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jcims
When 256 colors was good enough...

~~~
garmaine
For high res displays. The rest of us got by on 16 colors.

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garmaine
‘... before Ultima Thule encounter” should be added to title.

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eponeponepon
I'm really quite excited about this. I don't know if I'd just completely
missed it, or if they it hadn't had much publicity in the mainstream press,
but it was a pleasant surprise to read about yesterday!

~~~
garmaine
Well the government shutdown means that there's been no NASA PR for this.

~~~
tabtab
Fortunately, the Johns Hopkins University is posting some news and materials
because they operate part of the mission. Here is where they will post raw
images:

[http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-
Encounter/](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/UltimaThule-Encounter/)

More links: [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-
Center/](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/)

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sandworm101
Anyone else hoping this rock is a bracewell probe? Im so sick of mars rovers.
It is refreshing for a probe to be discovering something totally new. This
rock (or maybe group of rocks) was only a handful of pixels last week. Next
week it could be almost anything.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Not sure why it would hover around out there and wait for us to come to it.
(Also, it would be a hell of a coincidence if we happened to hit the only
probe out there.)

~~~
sandworm101
For the same reason they buried a monolith on the moon.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The Moon makes sense - we've only got one, it's a much smaller search area,
and iirc, it started actively broadcasting after a certain point.

The outer solar system is a huge search area.

It's the difference between your mailman leaving a package on your porch, or
somewhere in Canada.

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shagie
Its kind of neat watching The Deep Space Network -
[https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html)

Nearly every dish is receiving or sending to NHPC.

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kzrdude
Exciting! Sounds like they will get reasonable pictures (but the object is
quite small).

190 Watts is now equivalent to 20 lightbulbs, not 3 like the article suggests
:) since we've moved away from the incandescent ones.

~~~
behringer
We're going to need to compare electricity usage against some new appliance.
How about GPUs :P

The probe takes as much power as one high end GPU.

~~~
pavel_lishin
"This probe can mine up to one bitcoin a week!"

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SOMA_BOFH
it's leaving the solar system but no golden record.

instead, it has a quarter, a flag, human ashes and a cd-rom disc without a
drive or a codec.

srsly?

~~~
iamamrit
Well, if they are going to ship a codec, they will have to make a choice for
the CPU architecture or even have to ship a CPU. Then they might have to ship
some batteries as well

~~~
minipci1321
And of course, a full source code and the cross-compiler. On a CD-ROM.

~~~
heyjudy
Lol. But seriously, the irony is CD-ROM's degrade to completely unusable
within a century due to disc rot. A CD-ROM made with gold and completely
encapsulated in an extremely stable enamel might work. Then, leaving universal
instructions as to how to use said CD-ROM is important, rather than arrogantly
presumptive anthropocentrism.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Do you think NASA burned a 24x CD-ROM from their PC and added it to New
Horizons?

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zipotm
Please read here:
[http://expreso.co.cr/centaurs/essays/uranians.html](http://expreso.co.cr/centaurs/essays/uranians.html)
\- So called "Cupido" at 40.998 AU may be the same as "Ultima Thule"
object/planet. Research is done by Alfred Witte, based on Sun vibrational
field which is creating standing scalar waves and forming the physical
planets.

~~~
eesmith
"may be"?

How about, no, it isn't. The astrology link you pointed to says:

> 1- they are completely idealized points moving in perfect circles around the
> sun without any physical acceleration except the Sun's, i.e.

> 2- they are subject only to the influence of the Sun and are not affected by
> the gravitational interactions of other large bodies.

This is not true of Ultima Thule, with a perihelion of 42.721 AU and aphelion
of 46.442 AU. Its semi-major axis is nearly 10% larger than the mean solar
distance of 40.998 you quoted.

The text goes on to insist that "things in Astrology work very well even
though they do not or cannot physically exist", so why is there a need to have
it exist?

Furthermore, user "Juan" points out the problems in the analysis, such as "it
is obvious that the more asteroids you put into the equation, the more likely
you will find one that resembles in its motion the orbit at least of Cupido".
And the suggestion that 2000 KL4 matches Cupido.

How do we tell which is "really" Cupido?

