New Horizons explores 2014 MU69
NASA’s New Horizons space probe, operated by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, passes within 2,200 miles of the mysterious Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, a tiny fragment of leftover material from the birth of the solar system. Previously seen only as a tiny pixel even by the powerful lens of the Hubble Space Telescope, nothing was known of 2014 MU69 prior to the flyby, which revealed it as a contact binary: two bodies which had become gravitationally fused together. As 2014 MU69 (informally nicknamed Ultima Thule in a public poll conducted by the New Horizons public outreach team) is a billion miles further away than Pluto, and with New Horizons continuing outward at 30,000 miles per hour, signals between Earth and New Horizons take at least six hours to reach their destination, so the downlink of data from the flyby would take until 2020 to complete.
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British-born actor William Morgan Sheppard, a genre casting favorite ever since his 1985 appearance as Blank Reg in the original 
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The CW airs the 101st episode of The Flash, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ superhero starring Grant Gustin. 
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The 148th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. 
Commercial spaceflight operator Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, launches its tenth New Shepard flight. The uncrewed (but human-rated) capsule includes several payloads designed by NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program. As with past missions, both the capsule and its single-stage suborbital booster come in for soft landings near Blue Origin’s Texas launch facility. This is the fourth flight for the third New Shepard reusable capsule, as well as the fourth flight for the third New Shepard reusable booster.
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La-La Land Records releases a 2-CD set of selections from 
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The Israeli-built Beresheet uncrewed experimental lunar lander is launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Originally intended as an entrant for the Google Lunar X Prize, Beresheet (and all the other hopefuls) missed the March 31, 2018 deadline, leaving the $20,000,000 Lunar X Prize unclaimed. Unlike past lunar missions, Beresheet is launched into a high Earth orbit, whose apogee (maximum distance from Earth) will be increased over a period of nearly two months with multiple burns of the vehicle’s main engine until it coincides with the orbital distance of the moon, at which time the engine will be fired again to place it in a lunar orbit prior to landing. The lander contains digital copies of numerous documents from Earth, reflecting the builders’ Jewish heritage as well as extensive databases of knowledge from sources such as Wikipedia. As the lander itself has not been built with protective shielding of any kind, its operational lifetime is expected to last only around two days on the lunar surface. If the mission succeeds, Israel will be the fourth nation (after the United States, Soviet-era Russia, and China) to land a spacecraft on the moon.
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