New Horizons late cruise, 500 Millions kms - ~200 million kms |
New Horizons late cruise, 500 Millions kms - ~200 million kms |
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![]() IMG to PNG GOD ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Moderator Posts: 2251 Joined: 19-February 04 From: Near fire and ice Member No.: 38 ![]() |
New Horizon's distance from Pluto drops below 500 million km today. The main thread here has been active since before launch and until today.
Today is an appropriate day for a new thread and there are also less than 14 months until Pluto arrival (time flies!). The coming months will see more spacecraft activity than in recent years with optical navigation images of Pluto/Charon, images of Neptune etc. The next 14 months are going to be interesting to say the least. |
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Senior Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 1585 Joined: 14-October 05 From: Vermont Member No.: 530 ![]() |
Mag 26.8 for PT1 ... according to Wikipedia, visible from 8m telescopes? They don't need hubble exclusively to track it?
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![]() Member ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 701 Joined: 3-December 04 From: Boulder, Colorado, USA Member No.: 117 ![]() |
We will probably try to track these guys from the ground. From our ground-based search campaign, we already have a huge amount of data covering the locations of these objects, from 6-meter and 8-meter telescopes, going back to 2011. These KBOs are too faint to have been *discovered* in those data, but now we know where look, we might be able to *recover* them from the images, and thus extend our knowledge of their orbits. We'll be working on that over the winter, and will also be considering future ground-based tracking observations. Future ground-based tracking won't be as precise as Hubble's, but may provide a useful supplement and backup to Hubble- we'll see.
John |
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