January 1, 2019, the New Horizons team, which flew by Pluto in 2015, will now fly by a tiny rock in the outer portion of the Solar System, the Kuiper belt. This Kuiper Belt Object, officially known as 2014 MU69 and unofficially as Ultima Thule, is one of the pristine building blocks of the Solar System, and from it we can learn much how the Solar System came to be. But how is it that we can track this tiny rock only discovered a few years ago, to the point that we can take images where the closest approach will only be for 5 seconds long? The total predicted uncertainty now about 1 part in 2 billion, absolutely astounding accuracy!
I've used a lot of sources for this. This primarily includes the paper linked, which is pretty readable in my opinion, but also a lot of images from other locations. [ Ссылка ]
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Images from NASA, John Hopkins University Advanced Physics Laboratory (APL), and others I'm likely forgetting.
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