2:20 P.M. Eastern, 12/31: Hi there — I don’t have any profound statements for you right now, but I just wanted to include that image above. NASA put that out about 5 minutes ago. They received it around noon today, and you can see in the slide it’s taken from 1.2 million miles out.
Ultima Thule is elongated, as we more or less expected, and when you look at the time-lapse images we’ve gotten up to now, you can kind of see some edges flipping around:
Still no good explanation for the constant light reflection. No rings or clouds or moons found yet, but the day is young…..
There’ll be plenty more as the day goes on, and NASA TV and JHUAPL TV are on until 3 PM Eastern right now.
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7:09 P.M. Eastern, 12/31: There is at least one other image circulating that suggests a peanut shape, but I can’t verify it, so I have removed it for now.
Stay tuned to NASA TV and JHUAPL TV for an 8 P.M. Eastern update, and they will straighten us out….
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1 A.M. Eastern, 1/1: Good night, everyone, and have a happy and healthy New Year!
New Year’s Day, 10:29 A.M. Eastern, we expect to receive the signal from New Horizons that flyby went well, data was collected, and it’s pointed back toward Earth.
That’s a historic moment, confirming the exploration of the farthest object ever.
Pleasant dreams…….
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9:45 A.M. Eastern, 1/1: All right, it’s morning, and now we just wait for that signal !! NASA TV is on now, but the live peeps come back around 10:00 or 10:15. ☕️ ☕️
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10:30 A.M. Eastern, 1/1: And the signals are coming in! We have telemetry with the spacecraft! Importantly, too, data collection was good and all reporting systems are good!
NASA TV will be back at 11:30 A.M. to give us any incoming data and other updates. Don’t really expect pictures revealing the shape until after 2 P.M.
After signal was received, Principal Investigator Alan Stern and Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Alice Bowman celebrate:
Bowman: “We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission at 200 UTC today. Science to help us understand the origins of our Solar System.”
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11:35 A.M. Eastern, 1/1: And we do have a new image!
And the reason we were seeing constant reflection, NASA says, is that we are indeed viewing right down the axis of rotation. The simplest explanation! Sorry, no 100 moons, and it’s probably not an alien space station!
I also just got rid of my all-caps title, because I don’t want to sound deranged! 😆
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Next batch of images likely won’t be until after 6:30 P.M. Eastern, because there is a scheduled three-hour window for collecting image and other data which ends around then. A little bit of editing and processing will be needed, and then it will be released. That one should be enough to give us an image not unlike this one of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:
Till then, it’s warm here on the East Coast, so I think it’s time to get outisde and enjoy New Year’s Day!
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We do have a short sequence of the rotation that was processed from images received yesterday (12/31). It’s kinda teeny, but here it is: