What to watch new year’s eve, the sound of glasses and the chiming clock? Of course, you can watch the greetings of the President or one of the Soviet movies. But the best new year’s eve to see how mankind looks at one of the most distant known objects in the Solar system. In the night from December 31 to January 1, the probe “New horizons”, which was attended by Pluto in 2015, will fly past the dwarf planet Ultima Thule. We have not yet seen.
The probe New horizons will visit the Ultima Thule in the new year’s eve
As in the case with the passage of Pluto, the mission team New horizons will gather at the applied physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland, which will monitor the spacecraft from the operational center of the mission. Live broadcasts will show what the team before and after the approach, and scientists of the mission will hold a press conference, which will present the latest news on what the New Horizons probe.
That event will be broadcast on NASA TV, announced in his Twitter NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. If all goes according to plan, NASA video stream must start at the same time to fly around and accompanying press conference.
As for the time, everything will start on 31 December with a press briefing at 2 p.m. time ET (22:00 Moscow time). The flyby will take place at 12:33 am time ET January 1 (8:33 a.m. Moscow time). But at this moment we are not able to know if everything went smoothly. A radio message from a device reaches the Earth in six hours, and “New horizons” will not be able to send a signal until a few hours after its site visit. So somewhere between 9:45 and 10:45 a.m. ET (17:45 — 18:45 GMT), the mission team will receive a signal about the successful flight.
Soon after this confirmation, the command “New horizons” will hold a press conference and will show some pictures taken by the spacecraft before the flyby. These images are slightly blurry due to the distance of the camera to the object. But after receiving a signal New horizons will send data to the Ground, therefore, on 2 January we should get our first images of Ultima Thule in high resolution.
When New Horizons will fly past Ultima Thule at a distance of 4000 kilometers, it will be visible to him like the full Moon in the sky from Earth. But “New horizons” there are several high precision telescopes on Board, so we will have to get detailed pictures up close, like snapshots of the moon taken by powerful telescopes on earth.
But if you’re lucky, we’ll get a more detailed image than Pluto.
Will require a lot of time to collect all the fruit fly. New horizons will spend up to 20 months, transferring all the data that is collected in this New Year. Wait.