The manoeuvre will put the probe on a path to flyby Earth in October next year.
Thatcher requested that she not lie in state and that there be no military flyby.
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This flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.
ENGADGET: PSA: Asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass the Earth at 2:00pm ET Alt
The meteor strike happened on the same day that near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will make a close flyby of Earth.
Thatcher had requested that she not lie in state and that there be no military fly-past, or flyby, which sometimes marks funerary events.
The impactor used simpler versions of the flyby spacecraft's hardware and software and sent back images of Tempel 1 up to three seconds from impact.
Amid the peaks, we do a flyby of an impossibly tiny landing platform, grazing the ground to blow off some powder, then circling back and setting down.
Is its current flyby distance a problem for radar astronomers?
And the Moon is close by and always in the sky, unlike the asteroids that flyby the Earth at incredible velocities or inhabit orbits tens of millions of miles away that take years to reach.
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During the Annefrank flyby, Stardust will run through the exact sequence planned for the comet encounter, with science instruments all running and relaying data at high speeds for the first time since the space probe's launch.
Dennis Tito is planning an ambitious private flyby of Mars for 2018 that will carry all kinds of logistical challenges during its proposed 501-day span, not the least of which is shielding the crew from radiation without consuming valuable resources.
The world was already on edge in anticipation of the close-shave flyby of the near earth asteroid 2012 DA14, which was unexpectedly followed within the next 72 hours by two other separate fireballs over Northern California and parts of Florida.
Whether that's a Justin Bieber concert or a Psy concert or an asteroid flyby like we had the other day from NASA (that had about the same viewership as the Sony PlayStation -- 8 million people, and one million concurrents as well), all the way down to your local high school football game.
Alan Stern expects that after the Pluto flyby in 2015 or so, there will be plenty of power left, both electricity from the plutonium generator and fuel, so New Horizons will keep on going to explore other Plutolike objects in this region of the solar system which is known as the Kuiper Belt.
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