Fantastic! And meanwhile…
Back on 12/20 over in the Hive Tech &Science.
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~OGD~
I love this stuff so much - this is very cool indeed.
Six hours away at the speed of light and wasn’t even discovered until after the launch. Can’t wait for the images. NASA did some pretty cool stuff before the anti-science mob took over.
And just think…we just gave the big boys a tax cut that would fund 1500 more missions like this. Or give NIH enough to put the quietus on Cancer. Build 3000 high tech high schools or fix 1.5 million miles of our roads. God bless America!
BTW…this is the kind of stuff that makes most of the world think America a cool place. Not invasions or political meddling. This…fast food…rock and roll and Jurassic Park. America missed it’s calling. We were never going anywhere as “the world most powerful country” but we had the globe by the ball as long as we were its coolest country. The Ayatollah doesn’t give a shit about cruise missiles but iPhones scare the shit out of him.
Yeah.
sigh
And they were continue to do very cool stuff despite that mob. New Horizons was first proposed during the 1990s. Among countless failed proposals, NASA and space exploration survives because it captures the imagination a large part of our nation. That’s not going away.
But then again, iPhones scare the shit out of a lot of people.
Well, some.
A few?
Okay, they scare me! I admit it! They are like crack to the masses.
Sent from my iPhone.
I am hoping that this fly by will give us further insight into the origin and evolution of the baked potato. Every little bit counts.
Am I the only one that thinks the Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed US Space Cadet Force should have been on this one-way journey?
Amazing. For all the talk about how terrible the decline of the manned space program is, I think we should be doing more like this. Maybe I’m influenced by having up during the Voyager encounters rather than the Apollo landings, but it just seems to privide a far greater amount of both scientific knowledge and just cool stuff, and at a much lower cost.
“Scientists know only that Ultima Thule is elongated like a baked potato.”
-why a baked potato? why not just a regular potato?
Yes and no. As someone who does robotic instrumentation for ground based astronomy, I can tell you that robots can do things people do far more efficiently. We get a lot more data, and they can go places we can’t go, or do them for less money and without risking a human life. On the other hand, a person can still think far more quickly and adapt to situations that robots just can’t handle…everyone making a big deal about the programs that beat masters at chess don’t seem to realize that the chess program can’t do anything else while the chess master can. We’re still a long ways from a true AI that might be able to think, and even then it’s likely going to be limited in its creativity and ability to adapt to the unknown on first encounter.
That’s why we still need humans in the loop…all of the robotic probes out there are being managed by humans, and regularly drop into a safe mode and call for help when they have an anomaly. More importantly, we need humans to go out there because without that our species will never advance or make a mark on the universe beyond a few pieces of technology that will break down in a few million years after drifting through space and radio signals that will dissipate quickly. As the saying goes, space is the final frontier, and if we don’t manage to get out there and start surviving in it then we’re done…no matter what happens with the environment on Earth it will eventually become uninhabitable no matter what humans do, just because the Sun will eventually get hotter and in 100 million years or a billion years or so cause the oceans and atmosphere to evaporate. Us changing the climate may accelerate that time, or we may just wipe ourselves out and the Earth cool back down without us, but in the end it will happen…and unless we get into space either way will be the end of everything that has ever happened here.
Bacon bits count too. Especially on baked potatoes.
I watched the live stream of this last night. It was every bit the nerd prom that I expected it be, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The cameo appearance and commemorative song release by Brian May was an added bonus.
I am assuming at least some of the scientists are NASA employees working for free. God bless them.
The local news reported on that because they got questions and they have this new segment in which they run down facts for people and teach people the difference between bullshit and reality. I guess there was a lot of hysteria on social media about this mission being scratched because of the shutdown. Some of the NASA personnel are working for free - you’re right. Others are getting paid can’t remember the difference.
But I am grateful to them as well and thank them very much for what they are doing for humanity. God love the scientists.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one that went immediately from the ball drop in Times Square over to the New Horizions live stream. 
I have a dumbphone on purpose. I know I would be glued to an iPhone all day if I had one. It’s the same reason I don’t have Netflix.
More of a frozen potato.