!!Con West 2019 - Simon Porter: Guiding a starship with noise! And blinking!

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west The January 1, 2019 flyby of (486958) 2014 MU69 by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made MU69 the most distant object ever visited by humanity. However, MU69 is extremely faint, and only barely detectable with the Hubble Space Telescope. I will discuss how we made kernel density estimators for the faint images from Hubble and combined them with Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to build a probability cloud of where MU69 would be during the encounter. We also used this probability cloud to observe several stellar occultations of MU69, watching stars blink out for less than a second in order to tell us the size and shape of MU69. These techniques show the power of combining modern numerical probability estimates with a strong forward model to pull the best possible prediction out of poor-quality data.