One thought on “NASA has a New Year’s date with a distant space rock.”
I plan on tuning in, but don’t expect to see much. New Horizons will fly past Ultima Thule at 12:33 am EST, Jan 1st; but it’s so far away that the signal from the spacecraft will take more than six hours to reach Earth. They expect the first post-flyby signal acquisition to come in at about 10:15 am; 9 hours 42 minutes later. In others words, by the time we know that the probe survived the encounter, New Horizons will already be over 300,000 miles beyond Ultima Thule!
I plan on tuning in, but don’t expect to see much. New Horizons will fly past Ultima Thule at 12:33 am EST, Jan 1st; but it’s so far away that the signal from the spacecraft will take more than six hours to reach Earth. They expect the first post-flyby signal acquisition to come in at about 10:15 am; 9 hours 42 minutes later. In others words, by the time we know that the probe survived the encounter, New Horizons will already be over 300,000 miles beyond Ultima Thule!