Ultima Thule

January 14 Meeting: New Horizons at Ultima Thule

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Image: Artist's impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt Object.
Artist’s impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt Object. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Kai Getrost, CAA member and member of the NASA MU69 Occultation Team, will be program presenter at the January 14 meeting of the Cuyahoga Astronomical Association (CAA). Getrost will discuss the latest news about what we’ve learned, how we got there, and how he was involved in the mission on three science trips to South America.

This image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the most detailed of Ultima Thule returned so far by the New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers), with an original scale of 730 feet (140 meters) per pixel. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
This image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the most detailed of Ultima Thule returned so far by the New Horizons spacecraft. It was taken at 5:01 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18,000 miles (28,000 kilometers), with an original scale of 730 feet (140 meters) per pixel. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The successful January 1 flyby of Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69/Ultima Thule came after extensive work by the scientists and technicians running the New Horizons mission. Largely unknown, invisible to the public, were efforts on the part of others to accurately locate the spacecraft’s target of opportunity subsequent to Pluto. Teams of astronomers were dispatched with portable telescopes and computers to observe and time occultations of stars by the invisible (it’s only about 20 miles long and is 4 billion miles away) target object; the exact location and improved orbital information of Ultima Thule was derived from those observations. Occultation refers to the moment the light from a distant star is blocked by an object nearer the observer.

The CAA’s monthly meetings are held on the second Monday of every month (except December) at 7:30 PM at the Rocky River Nature Center; 24000 Valley Parkway; North Olmsted, Ohio, in the Cleveland Metroparks. Meeting programs are open to the public.

Following the presentation and a brief social break, the club will conduct its membership business meeting.