Guiding a starship with noise! And blinking!
summary
(486958) 2014 MU69 navigation combines noisy Hubble detections at magnitude 27 — roughly 150 detected photons per exposure — with a forward model and kernel density estimators wrapped into Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to produce a full probability cloud of where the object will be during encounter. Ground and airborne stellar occultations capture stars blinking out for less than a second and reveal a ∼30 kilometers scale body. The pipeline runs in Python with optimized C++ orbit integration and it succeeds.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:46New Horizons
- 2:07Sirius
- 4:13Lunar Horizon
- 5:50Finding the orbit
- 7:41Taking data
- 9:07Uncertainty
- 12:58Stellar occultation
- 13:10Blinking
- 13:26Detecting
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