Incredible that we sent a satellite 4 billion miles through space at 37,000 miles per hour, and met up with this moving object ... after 13 years ... and in a narrow window, observed, analyzed and photographed it as intended. I can't imagine the mathematics...
It's just amazing that we can see such old, old Solar System material!
Alan Stern said on one of the NASA YouTube updates just before the encounter that they detected Ultima Thule using New Horizons' cameras--it wasn't visible from Earth, so that's a first, too.
Brian May has apparently become one of the go-to people for stereoscopic images of small solar system objects that you have parked your vehicle at or driven by. He did some images for the Rosetta comet encounter, as well as
Hayabusa's asteroid, Ryugu (first spacecraft touchdown there is scheduled for February 18th, with a backup in March if that doesn't go well on the boulder-strewn asteroid). That adds a whole new dimension to watching Queen videos, but it makes sense, too, when you think about all those complex interweaving melodies in many of their songs. As a scientist, he told an interviewer once that music and physics are both mathematical.
