Hosted by Cstar1|Galaxies & More!
We keep our star talk down to earth! Beginning stargazers, professional astronomers, armchair astronauts and the cosmologically curious are all invited to join us. Galaxies Astronomy Club was founded in 1994.
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7/4/15
I think the article said only a few hundred feet per second remaining delta-v fuel.
Found it: "They have discovered 52 faint objects, but none that New Horizons can get to. The closest-found object, 2011 HZ102, would require New Horizons to change its speed by 210 meters per second. It has only enough fuel to achieve 130 meters per second."
130 meters per second is 5,118 inches per second velocity change. This is 426.5 feet per second, or 1,535,430 feet per hour, which is 290.8 miles per hour. While that seems fast if you're driving a dragster, for a spacecraft, that is a very small velocity change, not much more than a space shuttle de-orbit burn velocity change.
Out of more than 36,000 mph or so, this is a vector that is less than 1% from the primary trajectory.
It also looks like they are not going to do a small burn prior to the Pluto fly-by to get a gravitational assist to get more total delta-V out of the fuel that is left to target another Kupier Belt object.
At least they got a lot of Hubble time to find more objects, not sure if they actually have any candidates picked out for a close fly-by.
7/4/15
Either they were right on top of each other in an occultation, or the haze / seeing was too poor to see both Venus and Jupiter.
Just cranked up Stellarium to see what's really going on and when.
Closest conjunction was the night of June 30th. But Jupiter is magnitude -1.36, while Venus is -4.15, nearly 3 orders of magnitude brighter, so I suspect it's the haze that made Venus visible like a streetlight in fog, while Jupiter just vanished in the haze and light pollution from town off to the northwest.
7/5/15
New Horizons decided to put on a little 4th of July drama for the mission's fans. It's currently in safe mode, and it will likely be a day or two before it recovers and returns to science, but it remains on course for the July 14 flyby.
Read more from Planetary
7/6/15
Too bad we can't still mail a letter for that cheap.
I remember when a first class postage was a nickel, and I have some old letters with 5 cent stamps on them. Postage has increased almost 10x since then.
7/7/15
I think I remember 4c purple Lincoln stamps from when I was little. That's pure memory though, which we all know can be faulty!