Starship Asterisk*

Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 4:10 pm In Snow Crash, I wanted Neal Stephenson to have a franchulate called the “International Church of Pancakes” where those seeking refuge could go, catch breakfast and receive some uplifting moral message. But no – just a sword fighting Hiro and skate boarding Y.T. hanging out in the Metaverse.

"New Horizons" in that dystopia would be passé.

Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 5:17 pm An ICOP franchise might lead to new horizons within the breakfast community but face far flung difficulties for their legal department.

I would still entertain investors for my high-flying concept for a down-to-earth restaurant; “Out of this World!” Diners would eat around a huge rotating globe of the Earth while viewing, behind, an awesome planetarium. I think my fav would be in the “Orion” section though the view from “Sagittarius” might be pretty good too.

I have my architects and engineers working on it full-time. No, I'm afraid my plan wouldn't float which would just ruin the effect.

An SwRI-led team studied the craters and geology on Pluto and Charon and found there were fewer small craters than expected. This implies that the Kuiper Belt contains relatively small numbers of objects less than 1 mile in diameter. Imaged by New Horizon’s LORRI camera, the smooth, geologically stable “Vulcan Planitia” on Charon illustrates these findings. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/LORRI

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Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto’s largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare.

The Kuiper Belt is a donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Because small Kuiper Belt objects were some of the “feedstock” from which planets formed, this research provides new insights into how the solar system originated. ...

“These smaller Kuiper Belt objects are much too small to really see with any telescopes at such a great distance,” said SwRI’s Dr. Kelsi Singer ... “New Horizons flying directly through the Kuiper Belt and collecting data there was key to learning about both large and small bodies of the Belt.” ...

• Science 363(6340):955 (01 Mar 2019) DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8628

bystander wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 8:26 pm New Horizons Indicates Small Objects Are Rare in the Kuiper Belt
Southwest Research Institute | New Horizons | 2019 Feb 28

An SwRI-led team studied the craters and geology on Pluto and Charon and found there were fewer small craters than expected. This implies that the Kuiper Belt contains relatively small numbers of objects less than 1 mile in diameter. Imaged by New Horizon’s LORRI camera, the smooth, geologically stable “Vulcan Planitia” on Charon illustrates these findings. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/LORRI

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Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto’s largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare.

The Kuiper Belt is a donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Because small Kuiper Belt objects were some of the “feedstock” from which planets formed, this research provides new insights into how the solar system originated. ...

“These smaller Kuiper Belt objects are much too small to really see with any telescopes at such a great distance,” said SwRI’s Dr. Kelsi Singer ... “New Horizons flying directly through the Kuiper Belt and collecting data there was key to learning about both large and small bodies of the Belt.” ...

Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon Indicate a Deficit of Small Kuiper Belt Objects ~ Kelsi Singer et al

• Science 363(6340):955 (01 Mar 2019) DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8628

New Horizons Team Uses Stereo Imaging to Examine Kuiper Belt Object's Features

Parallel Stereo Image of Ultima Thule (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/NOAO)

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Cross your eyes and break out the 3D glasses! NASA’s New Horizons team has created new stereo views of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule – the target of the New Horizons spacecraft’s historic New Year’s 2019 flyby, four billion miles from Earth – and the images are as cool and captivating as they are scientifically valuable.

The 3D effects come from pairing or combining images taken at slightly different viewing angles, creating a “binocular” effect, just as the slight separation of our eyes allows us to see three-dimensionally. For the images on this page, the New Horizons team paired sets of processed images taken by the spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at 5:01 and 5:26 Universal Time on Jan. 1, from respective distances of 17,400 miles (28,000 kilometers) and 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers), offering respective original scales of about 430 feet (130 meters) and 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel.

The viewing direction for the earlier sequence was slightly different than the later set, which consists of the highest-resolution images obtained with LORRI. The closer view offers about four times higher resolution per pixel but, because of shorter exposure time, lower image quality. The combination, however, creates a stereo view of the object (officially named 2014 MU69) better than the team could previously create.

NASA’s New Horizons Team Unravels the Many Mysteries of Ultima Thule

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/NOAO/Brian May/Maria Banks/Roman Tkachenko

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The farthest object ever explored is slowly revealing its secrets, as scientists piece together the puzzles of Ultima Thule – the Kuiper Belt object NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year's Day, four billion miles from Earth.

Analyzing the data New Horizons has been sending home since the flyby of Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69), mission scientists are learning more about the development, geology and composition of this ancient relic of solar system formation. The team discussed those findings today at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Ultima Thule is the first unquestionably primordial contact binary ever explored. Approach pictures of Ultima Thule hinted at a strange, snowman-like shape for the binary, but further analysis of images, taken near closest approach – New Horizons came to within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) – have uncovered just how unusual the KBO's shape really is. At 22 miles (35 kilometers) long, Ultima Thule consists of a large, flat lobe (nicknamed "Ultima") connected to a smaller, rounder lobe (nicknamed "Thule"). ...

Because it is so well preserved, Ultima Thule is offering our clearest look back to the era of planetesimal accretion and the earliest stages of planetary formation. Apparently Ultima Thule's two lobes once orbited each other, like many so-called binary worlds in the Kuiper Belt, until something brought them together in a "gentle" merger. ...

daddyo wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 6:38 pm There's a new movie of the approach/recede from Ultima Thule that has what look like a number of variable stars in the background (I counted 18 so far): http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/images/main-pag ... npage2.mp4

Another link with more information, noting there are synthesized frames in there as well so I imagine there are some artificial effects in the pulsing of the stars, for instance I see a group of 3-4 flashing in sequence near the beginning middle right row, and another up-right from center that flashes 4 times then pauses: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Galleries/Featu ... age_id=603

From the New Horizon's website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

This map, compiled from images and data gathered by New Horizons during its flight
through the Pluto system in 2015, contains Pluto feature names approved by the IAU.
Latest approved names are in yellow. (Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Ross Beyer)

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Designations Were Proposed by NASA's New Horizons Mission Team

Several people and missions who paved the way for the historic exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt – the farthest worlds ever explored – are honored in the second set of official Pluto feature names approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the international authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features.

The new names were proposed by NASA's New Horizons team, which carried out the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons with the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. Along with a short list of official names the IAU had already approved, the mission science team had been using these and other place names informally to describe the many regions, mountain ranges, plains, valleys and craters discovered during the first close-up look at Pluto's surface. ...

• Alcyonia Lacus, a possible frozen nitrogen lake on Pluto's surface, is named for the bottomless lake in or in the vicinity of Lerna, a region of Greece known for springs and swamps; the Alcyonian lake was one of the entrances to the underworld in Greek mythology.
• Elcano Montes is a mountain range honoring Juan Sebastián Elcano (1476–1526), the Spanish explorer who in 1522 completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth (a voyage started in 1519 by Magellan).
• Hunahpu Valles is a system of canyons named for one of the Hero Twins in Mayan mythology, who defeated the lords of the underworld in a ball game.
• Khare crater honors planetary scientist Bishun Khare (1933–2013), an expert on the chemistry of planetary atmospheres who did laboratory work leading to several seminal papers on tholins – the organic molecules that probably account for the darkest and reddest regions on Pluto.
• Kiladze crater honors Rolan Kiladze (1931–2010), the Georgian (Caucasus) astronomer who made pioneering early investigations the dynamics, astrometry and photometry of Pluto.
• Lowell Regio is a large region honoring Percival Lowell (1855–1916), the American astronomer who founded Lowell Observatory and organized a systematic search for a planet beyond Neptune.
• Mwindo Fossae is a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Nyanga (Eastern Dem. Rep. Congo/Zaire) epic hero who traveled to the underworld and after returning home became a wise and powerful king.
• Piccard Mons is a mountain and suspected cryovolcano that honors Auguste Piccard (1884–1962), a 20th century inventor and physicist best known for his pioneering balloon flights into Earth's upper atmosphere.
• Pigafetta Montes honors Antonio Pigafetta (c. 1491–c. 1531), the Italian scholar and explorer who chronicled the discoveries made during the first circumnavigation of the Earth, aboard Magellan's ships.
• Piri Rupes is a long cliff honoring Ahmed Muhiddin Piri (c. 1470–1553), also known as Piri Reis, an Ottoman navigator and cartographer known for his world map. He also drew some of the earliest existing maps of North and Central America.
• Simonelli crater honors astronomer Damon Simonelli (1959–2004), whose wide-ranging research included the formation history of Pluto.
• Wright Mons honors the Wright brothers, Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur (1867–1912), American aviation pioneers credited with building and flying the world's first successful airplane.
• Vega Terra is a large land mass named for the Soviet Vega 1 and 2 missions, the first spacecraft to fly balloons on another planet (Venus) and to image the nucleus of a comet (1P/Halley).
• Venera Terra is named for the Venera missions sent to Venus by the Soviet Union from 1961–1984; they included the first human-made device to enter the atmosphere of another planet, to make a soft landing on another planet and to return images from another planetary surface.

In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning "sky" in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

bystander wrote: ↑Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:57 pm

In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning "sky" in the Powhatan language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan wrote:
The Powhatan people may refer to any of the Indigenous Algonquian people that are traditionally from eastern Virginia. The Powhatan tribe's notable descendants include Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson, and Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton.

The SWAP instrument aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has confirmed that the solar wind slows as it travels farther from the Sun. This schematic of the heliosphere shows the solar wind begins slowing at approximately 4 AU radial distance from the Sun and continues to slow as it moves toward the outer solar system and picks up interstellar material. Current extrapolations reveal the termination shock may currently be closer than found by the Voyager spacecraft. However, increasing solar activity will soon expand the heliosphere and push the termination shock farther out, possibly to the 84-94 AU range encountered by the Voyager spacecraft. (Credit: SwRI; Background: NASA/Adler Planetarium)

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Measurements taken by the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are providing important new insights from some of the farthest reaches of space ever explored. In a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team led by Southwest Research Institute shows how the solar wind — the supersonic stream of charged particles blown out by the Sun — evolves at increasing distances from the Sun.

“Previously, only the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 missions have explored the outer solar system and outer heliosphere, but now New Horizons is doing that with more modern scientific instruments,” said Dr. Heather Elliott, a staff scientist at SwRI, Deputy Principal Investigator of the SWAP instrument and lead author of the paper. “Our Sun’s influence on the space environment extends well beyond the outer planets, and SWAP is showing us new aspects of how that environment changes with distance.”

The solar wind fills a bubble-like region of space encompassing our solar system, called the heliosphere. From aboard New Horizons, SWAP collects detailed, daily measurements of the solar wind as well as other key components called “interstellar pickup ions” in the outer heliosphere. These interstellar pickup ions are created when neutral material from interstellar space enters the solar system and becomes ionized by light from the Sun or by charge exchange interactions with solar wind ions.

As the solar wind moves farther from the Sun, it encounters an increasing amount of material from interstellar space. When interstellar material is ionized, the solar wind picks up the material and, researchers theorized, slows and heats in response. SWAP has now detected and confirmed this predicted effect. ...

• Astrophysical Journal 885(2):156 (2019 Nov 10) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab3e49

The solar wind fills a bubble-like region of space encompassing our solar system, called the heliosphere. From aboard New Horizons, SWAP collects detailed, daily measurements of the solar wind as well as other key components called “interstellar pickup ions” in the outer heliosphere. These interstellar pickup ions are created when neutral material from interstellar space enters the solar system and becomes ionized by light from the Sun or by charge exchange interactions with solar wind ions.

As the solar wind moves farther from the Sun, it encounters an increasing amount of material from interstellar space. When interstellar material is ionized, the solar wind picks up the material and, researchers theorized, slows and heats in response...

The solar wind fills a bubble-like region of space encompassing our solar system, called the heliosphere. From aboard New Horizons, SWAP collects detailed, daily measurements of the solar wind as well as other key components called “interstellar pickup ions” in the outer heliosphere. These interstellar pickup ions are created when neutral material from interstellar space enters the solar system and becomes ionized by light from the Sun or by charge exchange interactions with solar wind ions. As the solar wind moves farther from the Sun, it encounters an increasing amount of material from interstellar space. When interstellar material is ionized, the solar wind picks up the material and, researchers theorized, slows and heats in response...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging wrote:

Interstellar Pickup Slug Line

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<<Slugging, also known as casual carpooling, is the practice of forming ad hoc, informal carpools for purposes of commuting, essentially a variation of ride-share commuting and hitchhiking. A driver picks up these non-paying passengers (known as "slugs" or "sluggers") at key locations, as having these additional passengers means that the driver can qualify to use an HOV lane or enjoy toll reduction. While the practice is most common and most publicized in the congested Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, slugging also occurs in San Francisco, Houston, and other cities.>>

The uniform color and composition of Arrokoth’s surface shows
the Kuiper Belt object formed from a small, uniform, cloud of
material in the solar nebula, rather than a mishmash of matter
from more separated parts of the nebula. The former supports
the idea that Arrokoth formed in a local collapse of a cloud in
the solar nebula. Credits: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI/R Tkachenko

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Data from NASA's New Horizons mission are providing new insights into how planets and planetesimals – the building blocks of the planets – were formed.

The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the ancient Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019, providing humankind's first close-up look at one of the icy remnants of solar system formation in the vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune. Using detailed data on the object's shape, geology, color and composition – gathered during a record-setting flyby that occurred more than four billion miles from Earth – researchers have apparently answered a longstanding question about planetesimal origins, and therefore made a major advance in understanding how the planets themselves formed. ...

"Arrokoth is the most distant, most primitive and most pristine object ever explored by spacecraft, so we knew it would have a unique story to tell," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It's teaching us how planetesimals formed, and we believe the result marks a significant advance in understanding overall planetesimal and planet formation."

The first post-flyby images transmitted from New Horizons last year showed that Arrokoth had two connected lobes, a smooth surface and a uniform composition, indicating it was likely pristine and would provide decisive information on how bodies like it formed. ...

Over the following months, working with more and higher-resolution data as well as sophisticated computer simulations, the mission team assembled a picture of how Arrokoth must have formed. Their analysis indicates that the lobes of this "contact binary" object were once separate bodies that formed close together and at low velocity, orbited each other, and then gently merged to create the 22-mile long object New Horizons observed.

This indicates Arrokoth formed during the gravity-driven collapse of a cloud of solid particles in the primordial solar nebula, rather than by the competing theory of planetesimal formation called hierarchical accretion. Unlike the gentle, low-velocity process that is the hallmark of particle-cloud collapse, in hierarchical accretion, planetesimals slammed into each other at increasingly higher speeds to form larger bodies. ...

Two other important pieces of evidence support this conclusion. The uniform color and composition of Arrokoth's surface shows the KBO formed from nearby material, as local cloud collapse models predict, rather than a mishmash of matter from more separated parts of the nebula, as hierarchical models might predict.

The flattened shapes of each of Arrokoth's lobes, as well as the remarkably close alignment of their poles and equators, also point to a more orderly merger from a collapse cloud. Further still, Arrokoth's smooth, lightly cratered surface indicates its face has remained well preserved since the end of the planet formation era. ...

• Science (online 13 Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6889

• Science (online 13 Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1126/science.aay6620

• Science (online 13 Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1126/science.aay3999

• Science (online 13 Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1126/science.aay3705

This two-frame animation of Proxima Centauri blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth images of the star, clearly illustrating the different view of the sky New Horizons has from its deep-space perch.

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For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we see from Earth.

More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. "It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth."

On April 22-23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the closest stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, showing just how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. Scientists have long used this "parallax effect" -- how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations -- to measure distances to stars.

An easy way to see parallax is to place one finger at arm’s length and watch it jump back and forth when you view it successively with each eye. Similarly, as Earth makes it way around the Sun, the stars shift their positions. But because even the nearest stars are hundreds of thousands of times farther away than the diameter of Earth’s orbit, the parallax shifts are tiny, and can only be measured with precise instrumentation.

“No human eye can detect these shifts,” Stern said.

But when New Horizons images are paired with pictures of the same stars taken on the same dates by telescopes on Earth, the parallax shift is instantly visible. The combination yields a 3D view of the stars “floating” in front of their background star fields. ...

But when New Horizons images are paired with pictures of the same stars taken on the same dates by telescopes on Earth, the parallax shift is instantly visible. The combination yields a 3D view of the stars “floating” in front of their background star fields. ...

Natural-color view of Pluto and its large moon Charon, compiled from images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on July 13 and 14, 2015. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

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Five years ago today, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made history. After a voyage of nearly 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, the intrepid piano-sized probe flew within 7,800 miles of Pluto. For the first time ever, we saw the surface of this distant world in spectacular, colored detail.

The encounter -- which also included a detailed look at the largest of Pluto’s five moons, Charon -- capped the initial reconnaissance of the planets started by NASA’s Mariner 2 mission more than 50 years before, and revealed an icy world replete in magnificent landscapes and geology -- towering mountains, giant ice sheets, pits, scarps, valleys and terrains seen nowhere else in the solar system.

And that was only the beginning.

In the five years since that groundbreaking flyby, nearly every conjecture about Pluto possibly being an inert ball of ice has been thrown out the window or flipped on its head. ...

Scientists now know that, despite it being literally out in the cold, Pluto is an exciting, active and scientifically valuable world. Incredibly, it even holds some of the keys to better understand the other small planets in the far reaches of our solar system.

Here are 10 of the coolest, weirdest and most unexpected findings about the Pluto system that scientists have learned since 2015, thanks to data from New Horizons.

1. Pluto has a "heart," and it drives activity on the planet ...
2. There’s probably a vast, liquid, water ocean sloshing beneath Pluto’s surface ...
3. Pluto may still be tectonically active because that ocean is still liquid ...
4. Pluto was -- and still may be -- volcanically active ...
5. Glaciers cut across Pluto’s surface even today, and they’ve done so for billions of years ...
6. Pluto has heat convection cells on its giant glacier Sputnik ...
7. Pluto has a literal beating “heart” that controls its atmosphere and climate ...
8. Pluto has dunes ...
9. Pluto and Charon have almost no little craters, and that has some big implications ...
10. Charon had a volcanic past, and it could be key to understanding other icy worlds ...

Collaborative observations with NASA’s New Horizons mission have been ongoing at the Subaru Telescope since May 2020. Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), the wide field camera mounted on the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope, is used for the observations to search for target candidates for New Horizons’ next observations. Astronomers from Japan are participating in the observation team together with ones from the New Horizons mission. ...

New Horizons is going to continue its exploration in the outer Solar System. The Subaru Telescope was selected as one of the facilities to search for target candidates for New Horizons’ next observations. Dr. Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute, the Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission, emphasizes the importance of the observations using the Subaru Telescope, saying “We are using the Subaru Telescope because it is the best in the world for our search purposes. This is due to its unique combination of telescope size—one of the very largest anywhere, and Hyper Suprime-Cam’s wide field of view—which can discover many Kuiper Belt objects at once.”

The Subaru Telescope is observing an area equivalent in size to 18 full moons (which can be covered in 2 pointings by HSC) in the constellation of Sagittarius, where New Horizons is now cruising. From the observations with the Subaru Telescope, the team expects to discover 100s of new Kuiper Belt objects, of which about 50 should be observable at a distance with the New Horizons spacecraft. Observing with both the Subaru Telescope and New Horizons is important to discern the nature of mysterious objects in the outer Solar System. ...