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Probe sends first glimpse of distant icy world

Ultima Thule views
The left image shows a raw, pixel-by-pixel view of an icy object known as Ultima Thule, as captured by NASA’s New Horizons probe at 11:56 a.m. ET Dec. 30 from a distance of 1.2 million miles. (JHUAPL / SwRI / NASA via YouTube)

LAUREL, Md. — The science team for NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft released its first multi-pixel view of an icy world more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and the analysis suggests it’s an elongated space cigar.

“We know it’s not round, we can say that with confidence,” John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the mission’s project scientists, said today during a news briefing scheduled just hours before the probe was due to fly just 2,200 miles past the mysterious object.

Based on observations made on Earth during stellar occultations, Spencer and other astronomers suspected that the object — known by its formal designation, 2014 MU69, or by its nickname, Ultima Thule — might be made of smooshed-together chunks of ice and rock.

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Ring in the New Year with history’s farthest flyby

Alan Stern
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, stands alongside a scale model of the New Horizons spacecraft after a briefing on the Ultima Thule flyby. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LAUREL, Md. — The sleeping bags are rolled out and the videos are cued up for a New Year’s celebration of cosmic proportions here at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, but the star of the show is still a mystery.

That’ll change once NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flies past an icy object more than 4 billion miles from Earth, known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule.

The piano-sized probe is due to make its closest approach at 12:33 a.m. ET on New Year’s Day (9:33 p.m. PT Dec. 31), nearly 13 years after New Horizons’ launch and three and a half years after it flew past Pluto.

Mission managers say it’s all systems go for history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial body.

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Bill Gates shifts nuclear sights from China to U.S.

TerraPower lab
TerraPower, a venture co-founded by Bill Gates, conducts nuclear energy research at a 10,000-square-foot laboratory in Bellevue, Wash. (TerraPower Photo)

In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America’s leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture.

“The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change,” Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released tonight. “Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game.”

Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower’s grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China.

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Year in Science: Genetic hopes and fears come true

He Xiankui
Chinese researcher He Jiankui discusses his lab’s effort to produce babies whose genes have been altered to protect them from future HIV infection. (The He Lab via YouTube)

In science, it was the best of times, and the worst of times.

2018 was a year when researchers focused in on ways to head off disease by reprogramming a patient’s own cells, but also crossed what many thought were ethical red lines in genetic experimentation. It was the first year in which women won a share of the Nobel Prize for physics as well as for chemistry, but also a year when the #MeToo issue came to the fore in the science community.

And it was the year that marked the passing of British physicist Stephen Hawking, who was arguably the world’s best-known living scientist.

As I look back at 2018, I’m seeing some stories that I missed but ended up featuring prominently in other folks’ year-end recaps. So, to even things out, my top-ten list focuses on five developments that we featured in the course of the last 12 months, and five more that didn’t get much play at the time.

Feel free to use the comment section to cast write-in ballots for the year’s science highlights and low lights. (For example, the sad tale of Tahlequah and the Southern Resident orca population tops The Seattle Times’ year-end list).

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Year in Space: From launch pad to beyond Pluto

Falcon Heavy launch
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket clears the tower in February 2018. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Launches, launches, launches! 2018 was a big year for liftoffs, particularly for SpaceX and its billionaire CEO, Elon Musk. The past year also saw a number of notable trips to interplanetary destinations, including the Martian surface and two asteroids. What’s up for next year? More of the same, only way different.

For more than two decades, I’ve been writing year-end roundups of the top stories in space science and exploration, with a look-ahead to cosmic coming attractions. 2019 could well bring about developments I’ve been predicting on an annual basis going as far back as a decade, such as the rise of commercial human spaceflight.

Other trends are easier to predict, because they’re based on the cold, hard facts of celestial mechanics. Check out these tales from 2018, expected trends for 2019 and my year-end space roundups going back to 2001 (with lots of failed predictions). Then feel free to weigh in with your comments to tell me what I missed.

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A virtual-reality virgin finally takes the leap

Portal VR experience
Portal VR’s Tim Harader puts a virtual-reality headset on Tonia Boyle’s head. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — My wife was a VR virgin.

Tonia Boyle isn’t exactly a thrill-seeker. Skydiving, bungee jumping and zipline rides have never been her cup of tea. But when it came to taking a virtual-reality risk at Portal VR’s newly opened arcade here in Bellevue, our hometown, she warily agreed to take the leap.

Fortunately, in this case, the leap was just a couple of inches down, although it looked like 50 floors through her virtual-reality headset.

Tonia’s guide was Portal VR co-founder Tim Harader, who opened up the first Portal VR arcade in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood last year in league with his wife, Page Harader. During this month’s opening reception in Bellevue, Tim helped Tonia strap on the HTC Vive headset and got her set up inside a blocked-off booth where sensors could track her movements.

From the outside, it looked as if Tonia was standing at the brink of a roughly 6-foot-long wooden plank set on the floor. But her headset view, projected onto a monitor just outside the booth for our viewing pleasure, showed a similarly sized plank stretching out into the air from the upper floors of a skyscraper.

Tonia gasped at the sight.

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Juno probe delivers holiday treats from Jupiter

Jupiter views from Juno
Enhanced images from NASA’s Juno orbiter show cloud patterns on Jupiter (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Brian Swift / Seán Doran Photos)

Santa Claus isn’t the only one bearing gifts from the north pole at this time of year. NASA’s Juno orbiter also delivered a sackful of presents over the holidays, but from the pole of a different planet: Jupiter.

Every 53 days, the bus-sized spacecraft makes a close encounter with our solar system’s biggest planet, as part of a mission that was launched in 2011 and reached Jupiter in 2016.

Juno’s main mission is to study Jupiter’s magnetic field and gravitational field, to give scientists a deeper understanding of the gas giant’s internal composition. But a visible-light camera called JunoCam was included on the probe, primarily to boost public outreach and education.

The latest encounter, known as Perijove 17, occurred on Dec. 21 and went over Jupiter’s north pole.

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How technology made 1968’s ‘Earthrise’ possible

Earthrise
Apollo 8’s astronauts were the first to witness Earthrise from lunar orbit, on Christmas Eve in 1968. (NASA Photo / Bill Anders)

It’s been 50 years to the day since Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders’ “Earthrise” photo changed our world forever, but that mission to the moon and back wouldn’t have happened the way it did if it weren’t for a giant leap in technology.

That comes through loud and clear in “Apollo’s Daring Mission,” a NOVA documentary making its debut on public television on Wednesday.

“NASA usually went step-by-step. In this case, they jumped three or four steps,” the 85-year-old Anders, who now lives in Anacortes, Wash., says during the show.

The Apollo 8 story usually spotlights the impact of Anders’ photos, which show our planet hanging over the moon’s surface, and the magic of the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis. Those moments get their due in “Apollo’s Daring Mission.” But the show focuses primarily on the engineering magic that opened the way for history to be made in 1968.

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Former Boeing exec takes over the Pentagon

Pat Shanahan
Pat Shanahan speaks at the opening of Boeing’s Seattle Delivery Center in 2015. Two years later, the Boeing executive was chosen to become deputy defense secretary. (GeekWire Photo / Jacob Demmitt)

President Donald Trump says Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, will take charge of the Pentagon on Jan. 1 in the wake of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ shocking resignation.

Trump announced Shanahan’s shift to the post of acting defense secretary today on Twitter, because of course he did.

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SpaceX launches first next-gen GPS satellite

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket sent a next-generation GPS satellite into orbit today for the U.S. Air Force, marking a couple of firsts — as well as a “last.”

It’s the first GPS III spacecraft to reach space, marking the start of a transition that will triple the accuracy of the Global Positioning System and boost its capability to resist jamming by up to eight times.

It’s also the first official SpaceX launch of a national security payload for the Air Force under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, after a years-long process that saw SpaceX file a lawsuit against the federal government (and ultimately reach a settlement).

And the “last”? Today’s mission was the 21st and last launch for SpaceX in 2018, setting a new record for the California-based company. (Last year’s 18 marked its previous personal best.)

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