efaardvark

I'm getting ready for Ultima Thule too but in more of a spectator way I can't wait to see the data, images and all. Going to stay up for the signal around midnight then catch some zzz's and look at the images the next day I missed Pluto back in the day (completely forgot). The fact that this one is on New Years actually works in my favor  

There probably won't be much to see right away.  The data rates possible from that far away are pretty low.  It literally took them months to play all the data down from the spacecraft after the Pluto flyby at the nominal 4kilobits/sec data rate.  Remember the dial-up days of 9600baud?  We're talking even slower than that.    The realtime commentary will probably be mostly talking heads and CGI tbh. 

But yeah, there might be a couple low-quality (highly compressed) pics the next day, with more/better ones coming out in the days and weeks that follow.  Ultima Thule is pretty small (37km/23mi) compared to Pluto (2,300km) so there's not a lot to look at.  OTOH, the spacecraft is going to pass within 3,500km, which is about 3x closer than it got to Pluto.  Any pics - and other data - we do (eventually) get should be pretty interesting.

BTW, as I type this the DSN Now site shows the spacecraft (look for "NHPC") tracking, with a downlink data rate of only 1kbps.

Its still all some pretty cool stuff I am sure we will know more before long. Though thats the fun of that sort of work.