Waiting...

[quoththeravyn]

New Years' Day...

It's a day of waiting for a signal to cross the solar system. At lightspeed from Ultima Thule (slightly beyond, actually), incoming to the earth at 6 hours and a bit travel time.

And... it's there! The New Horizons space probe survived the encounter (there's a chance it could have hit a rock or a grain of dust or something)! And the data pointers are right where they were expected to be, so there's probably a full load of data, including pictures with 40-ish meter per pixel resolution.

The little spacecraft that could, did. Again. It'll be downlinking the data for the next two years or so. It's a 25 watt transmitter; it's kind of amazing we can get the signal at all at this distance.

It's always fun listening in to the control room of somebody else's spacecraft, trying to figure out the acronyms as the Mission Operations Manager polls each subsystem for status.

Also up today, between events Out There, is making chicken broth out of the bones and carcass of last weekend's dinner, thawing out a slice of Christmas stollen. Oh, and, if I can spare some attention, re-reading, yet again, my latest attempt at a novel, right through, so as to arrive at answers to questions like, Would anybody else ever want to read something like this? How exactly can I introduce more conflict that's not just between the ears of the narrator? And how to communicate the setting and the characters' reactions and feelings (as viewed from inside the head of the narrator, who's maybe not the most sensitive person ever).

Comments

[hamimi_fk]

Happy new year!

It just occurred to me: Do you, personally, ever get to see any of those "first" or unreleased photos from space? Or do you have to wait for them to be released like the rest of us? (I don't know if this is a weird question, I'm still half asleep after going to bed late. Had to drink my medicine, blah.)

Also, what is a Christmas stollen? o.o

[quoththeravyn]

For this mission, I'm a spectator just like everybody else.

For the mission I actually work on, in principle I can access any of the data (to support operations or troubleshooting or calibration, for example). For example, not long after the New Horizons Pluto flyby, Dr. Stern asked us to get x-ray data on Pluto, to see about interactions between the solar wind and the dilute atmosphere. A lot of the folks around the office looked at those data, just because it's fun. (The answer? *maybe* they detected it above the background level. Not very satisfying, I know, but it was a long shot.)

Stollen is a kind of sweet bread with some dried fruit and nuts in it. It has a much larger cake to fruit ratio than typical American "fruitcake" or (from what I understand) British Yorkshire Puddings. The wife of a friend seems to make them by the dozen every year, so late in the day on Christmas Eve, the doorbell rang, and there was J handing me sweets. I cut it in half and froze part, and slowly ate through the unfrozen part last week.

[hamimi_fk]

How do you take an x-ray of Pluto?

J think I've heard of stollen before but it's definitely not something I've ever had. Though at the mention of fruitcake, I'm sadly reminded that I didn't eat any this year. Perhaps I can find some for cheap since it's after the holidays...

[quoththeravyn]

The satellite for which I'm part of the operations team does x-ray astronomy, waiting in near-earth space for x-rays generated by astronomical objects to hit our telescope while we're pointed at it. You have to do it in orbit because the atmosphere absorbs all the x-rays from space (which is good, because they would cause mutations otherwise). They tend to come from violent places in the universe, or very hot places. So it was a bit of a surprise that there's an interaction between the solar wind and comets that makes them bright in x-rays. They were hoping to see something similar at Pluto. Now that we know it's interesting, perhaps someone will follow up with a longer observation, or using another, larger, telescope.