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New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

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Re: New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

#2

Post by mbrundle »

I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?

Re: New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

#4

Post by [deleted] »

mbrundle wrote: post #2

I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?

[deleted]

Re: New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

#5

Post by jameskilton »

mbrundle wrote: post #2

I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?

Actually doing the fly-by is less impressive (the fly-by was planned and programmed a while ago) than the fact that we were able to line up Horizons to an object like this at all!

https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1077986070128668674

Re: New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule

#6

Post by hcrisp »

mbrundle wrote: post #2

I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?

I searched for "New Horizons GNC" and this link came up [1]. "The AOCS/GNC (Attitude and Orbital Control System / Guidance Navigation and Control) subsystem takes care that a spacecraft points to a specific point in space, determines the s/c attitude, and does trajectory corrections."

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9556/how-does-new-...

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