Even traveling at the speed of light, it still takes more than half a day for data transmissions to reach Earth, from New Horizons, now some four billion miles from home. So, at this very moment, the high res images of Ultima Thule snapped by it, as it flew by last night, are just now passing Saturn's orbit, and bending inward toward Mars. . . . and sometime in the early morning of Wednesday, they will reach an Australian sky dish.
Then, an hour or so after that, here in the US, we will begin to see (in crystal clarity) the exact shape and rotation dynamics of the planetissimal. [Over on Twitter, I've bet on a drawing labeled "G" -- something that looks like a pair of eggs, improbably smushed halfway together, end to end. I am hopeful to have won the space science Tweet pool, of about twenty-two alternative shapes.]
So now. . . for me at least. . . the waiting -- and the silence, are the hardest parts. But the darkness does make it all that much blindingly bright, when that sweet copper colored beauty twists onward, across the blacktop -- powdered with stars. . . to say a liltingly-soft "hello. . ."
"Hello". And onward. It's 2019, now baby -- rounded, even, and ending in zero numbers for us both, upcoming. Smile. . . .
नमस्ते
