Pictures of 2014 MU69 “Ultima Thule” expected shortly

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Right around 17:27 UTC today — about four hours from now — NASA’s New Horizons probe is scheduled to send pictures of the most-distant object we’ve
[See the full post at: Pictures of 2014 MU69 “Ultima Thule” expected shortly]

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AJNorth, GreatAndPowerfulTech, OscarCP, SueW, Elly, Karlston, ch100, geekdom

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Interesting article! It wasn’t quite 8 hours from your post time, as closest approach was at 0833 est. I have been watching the progress of this since before it’s launch via their website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

check it out if you get some time it has lots of articles on their progress and scientific discoveries as well as lots of photos of Jupiter, Pluto and asteroids.

Today will be busy as we are watching the Rose parade with my son and wife, then afterwards the annual winter classic (outdoor nhl hockey game) both traditions. This year is even better since my home team, the Boston Bruins are playing in it…. just hope it snows in Indiana today to make it a good traditional hockey game.

Somehow I will try to see the new horizons results.

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woody, OscarCP

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Let’s hope that the forced push to 1809 doesn’t hit NASA’s computers at the wrong moment!

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Cybertooth, BobbyB

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The good or bad thing about aerospace, it takes years to test and qualify new software to ensure it doesn’t cause spacecraft or aircraft to due funny things. Since this launched in Jan 2006, my guess is that they are using something like Windows XP (although Sun systems is used more on things like this), so its probably a lot more solid than Windows 10.

I read an article a while back about an air traffic control system that the only people who can fix the code are all in their 80’s (can’t seem to find it now). I did see that just recently, the US air traffic control just updated a 40 year old computer system.

I understand the Voyager probes (still operational and still exploring the edge of our solar system and interstellar space) use Fortran 5 and 77.  https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/ I wonder who is able to still program that?

Windows 8.1 Group B, Brave & Mozilla ESR - grudgingly & Protonmail

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I know a lot of aerospace systems for sure use Fortran 66.  Fortran 77 is still used heavily; even today people write new code in it, some of which I have been victimized to update as needed.

Fortran, C++, R, Python, Java, Matlab, HTML, CSS, etc.... coding is fun!
A weatherman that can code

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AlexN, for that, you have my deepest sympathies.

I can vouch for the fact that the code routinely developed for projects where I participate, both at NASA and elsewhere, is is still largely written using Fortran, because of the huge amount of heritage software still around written in that language and the ease of recycling old Fortran subroutines and procedures into new applications. I have seen (and still see) things being written in F77 or F90/95, but older versions than these are no longer used when writing new code. Besides, Fortran has been developed primarily for writing scientific and engineering-type applications heavy on number crunching so it is still quite useful, for that reason, and has been considerably modernized in recent versions, from F90 through F2008, including the introduction of parallelized versions and advanced optimization, mainly to be used in supercomputers for weather and climate-related modelling and other very large-scale computing work.

Of course, there is also a quite a bit of new code being written in C, C++, Python, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

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Eeek… just got up, half-asleep and read ” the most-distant object we’ve ever seen should hit earth”. That certainly got me awake!

But seriously, will follow the story with great interest.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

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Cybertooth

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The dangers of superficial reading of headlines: I processed “Pictures of Ultima Thule from 2014 expected shortly” and feared that this had suddenly become some kind of, uhhh, adult site. “Dang, he should have made sure to renew his domain registration in time…”

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Karlston

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The grand agents of nature are indestructible.

— James Joule, FRS (1818 – 1889)

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? says:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/807/new-horizons-successfully-explores-ultima-thule/

huh?

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Seasonally late?

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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cesmart4125, Elly, OscarCP

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Wonderful first photo, considered that sunlight there is some 1900 times weaker than here on Earth and this is a very dark object on top of that. So now the chosen nickname is “Snowman”, not “Peanut”? That is slightly more dignified too, I think.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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cesmart4125

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Here is a link to the complete NASA panel discussion of today on all the preliminary results obtained so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZnFiN1cXS0

There will be another tomorrow.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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cesmart4125

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Today’s second panel discussion of results from flyby can be watched here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fhYADgnb2A

And the main Web site for all things Ultima: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

(There has been some problem uploading the video to YouTube, so the actual panel presentation starts some 14:30 minutes from the start of the video; before that there is only a still image with an announcement of the panel that is about to begin. So one has to shift the cursor along the bottom red line that appears when it is moved cross the screen, to the 14:30 mark to watch the discussion.)

There will be no further briefings until the end of this month, because soon the Sun will be between the spacecraft and the Earth (that is, the spacecraft will be entering superior conjunction) and only when the former comes out from behind the body and glare of the Sun the transmissions of data will resume, making it possible to get further interesting details, including high resolution images, much better than the ones shown so far, as well as reliable 3-D mapping of the shape of the body.

About a left unexplained bit of jargon used by one of the panelists: “KBO” = “Kuiper Belt Object.”

 

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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