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Thread: New Horizons spacecraft makes first photographic detection of Kuiper Belt

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    Default New Horizons spacecraft makes first photographic detection of Kuiper Belt


    The figure on the left is a composite image produced by adding 48 different exposures from the News Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), each with an exposure time of 29.967 seconds, taken on Aug. 16, 2018. The predicted position of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule is at the center of the yellow box, and is indicated by the yellow crosshairs, just above and left of a nearby star that is approximately 17 times brighter than Ultima. At right is a magnified view of the region in the yellow box, after subtraction of a background star field "template" taken by LORRI in September 2017 before it could detect the object itself. Ultima is clearly detected in this star-subtracted image and is very close to where scientists predicted, indicating to the team that New Horizons is being targeted in the right direction. The many artifacts in the star-subtracted image are caused either by small mis-registrations between the new LORRI images and the template, or by intrinsic brightness variations of the stars. At the time of these observations, Ultima Thule was 107 million miles (172 million kilometers) from the New Horizons spacecraft and 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

    NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year's 2019 close encounter.

    Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA's Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team's first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.

    "The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. "It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that's roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer."

    This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima's orbit............... more

    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-horizo...flyby.html#jCp

    Thule (/ˈθjuːli/;[1] Greek: Θούλη, Thoúlē; Latin: Thule, Tile)[2] was the place located furthest north, which was mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature and cartography.

    In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin "furthermost Thule") acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world".



    By the late middle ages and early modern era, the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland.[4] By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.[5][6]


    Corey said he's also been to the Kuiper Belt
    Last edited by Hervé; 29th August 2018 at 16:03. Reason: picture resized, minoe formatting

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    Default Re: New Horizons spacecraft makes first photographic detection of Kuiper Belt

    Interesting...no one mentioned the distinct dark object in the lower right of the first image, so I'll say: there is a distinct dark object in the lower right of the first image.

    I would not initially guess that a speck of ice or dust would appear that distinctly from compiling forty-eight exposures.

    Most likely, if submitted for expert analysis, we would learn it is a speck of ice or dust.

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