Congratulations to Alan Stern and the New Horizons team. The flyby appears to have been a success, we now know that it’s bilobal, and it didn’t have a light curve because the spacecraft was (coincidentally) coming toward its spin axis. Not enough data yet to know if it has a 15-hour or 30-hour period, but we’ll start getting high-res pictures tomorrow. It will take two year to download all the data, though, to give similar resolution that we got for Pluto.
[Update a while later]
High(er) res tomorrow, not high-res.
What a nice surprise. I’m looking forward to pictures.
OT: For whatever reason, only the main part of the post shows up in Firefox Focus on Android. No navigation links, comments, etc. Not a problem for me, however.
Dittos on the congrats!
The snowman image is quite amazing. It will keep astrophysicists up nights working out the dynamics of such a joining. As well it should.