MTI wants to salute all our friends who work at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Metro Teleproductions Inc, has worked with JHUAPL for the past 15 years supplying video services ,this week the focus is on the space probe New Horizons, which last night flew by Ultima Thule, an icy rock floating about a billion miles beyond Pluto. At over four billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is the most distant object ever explored (by Earthlings, at least).
A huge shout out to John Obrien, Neil Reubenstein, Ben Wong, David Vespoint , Jim Harris some of the great staffers at JHU APL who we have provided Video Production over the past 15 years. Depending on the situation MTI will provide production personnel or video equipment depending on the type of job. MTI is celebrating its 30th year of operations in the Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia region
Today was a final press conference at the Kossiakoff Center In Laurel, Md.
From CNN:
Mission scientists from NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have confirmed that the New Horizons spacecraft conducted a flyby of Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object that’s a billion miles beyond Pluto.
Although the flyby occurred at 12:33 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the spacecraft is so far from Earth that the “phone-home” signal didn’t reach us until about 10:30 a.m. ET.
Mission scientists were relieved about the success because there was only one chance to get it right as New Horizons screamed past Ultima at 31,500 miles per hour. This incredible feat was possible because thousands of operations on the spacecraft worked in sync.
“We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby,” mission operations manager Alice Bowman said. “This science will help us understand the origins of our solar system.”
New Horizons has also sent back a first look at Ultima Thule — taken from half a million miles out, so pardon the pixels.
This is the best look scientists have ever had at Ultima. Before, they saw it as only a single pixel.
