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New Horizons flyby of Arrokoth: First Resolved Image downlink

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Published on Jan 21, 2020

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 'Arrokoth' on January 1, 2019. The science team was receiving data and processing it in real-time. Here, Tod Lauer becomes the first person (by a few seconds) to see Arrokoth's shape.

I came into the Geology room at the just as the observations came down and Tod and the rest of the team started processing them. I could tell Tod was 'in the zone,' so I hit record. He's drumming along to Steely Dan's "FM," while running his FORTRAN-based imaging code which has needed only minimal upgrades since first developed in on a PDP-11/70.

Tod says, "You know, I never in a million years thought that my career would take me to that place of 'on-demand image processing.' I was really happy to sit in my office and take my time to optimize my algorithms and really develop a great framework for image processing. And here we were -- there's like 30 of us in the room, everyone's shouting, and -- bam, the images are down, and it's a race to process them. I could never do that before -- I could never zone out in the chaos surrounding me like that. I had to really train myself to listen to music to tune it all out."

http://tinyurl.com/NewHorizonsPhotos

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    • Walter Becker, Donald Fagen
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