New Horizons

[Felsmak]

*Whacks georgTF with a trout for trying to invoke Murphy's law.*

That person is a traitor to science.

[Streetwind]

We should give him to GLaDOS. She is very experienced in dealing with traitors to science.

[Candlelight]

2 more weeks to go!

Get ready!

Edited June 29, 2015 by Candlelight

[Shpaget]

Two weeks till closest approach, but when will we get the pictures?

Because, you know.. pics or it didn't happen.

[basic.syntax]

Two weeks till closest approach, but when will we get the pictures?

Because, you know.. pics or it didn't happen.

I'll be watching this thread Exhaustive detail on that question here.

[Shpaget]

Thanks. I'll be watching that link.

[*Aqua*]

•Only 1% of the science data from the flyby will be returned to Earth during the period around closest approach, including images that the mission has selected for their high science value as well as high public interest. They will be releasing captioned and processed versions as fast as their small team can manage.

•The rest of the image data will be downlinked beginning in September, about 2 months after encounter. It will take 10 weeks to download the full data set.

2 months after fly-by! And then it'll take 10 weeks to download! That means only after November scientists will have full access to all data and pump out papers.

At least the winter won't be boring because of that.

[Frida Space]

That means only after November scientists will have full access to all data and pump out papers.

Actually, New Horizons will finish transmitting all the data back around November 2016, so yea...

it'll take 10 weeks to download

I think you mean "10 months"

Edited June 30, 2015 by Frida Space

[*Aqua*]

I took my quote from the link basic.systax provided and that says it takes 10 weeks.

[Frida Space]

I took my quote from the link basic.systax provided and that says it takes 10 weeks.

Well, it's wrong.

"The prime mission will be over when all the data is to the ground, somewhere around the end of 2016." - Michael Vincent, NH Team

"New Horizons' flyby of Pluto happens on July 14, 2015, but it will begin gathering science data in January and will not finish returning all of the data until late 2016." - Emily Lakdawalla

"In fact we will gather so much information about Pluto and its moons that it will take New Horizons until the end of 2016 to transmit all its data back to Earth." - Alan Stern, NH Principal Investigator

"October-December 2016: Pluto encounter data playback ends" - New Horizons @ JHUAPL website

I think that should be enough

Edited June 30, 2015 by Frida Space

[1of6Billion]

Is that a Hypetrain in the distance?

Certainly feels like one

[smjjames]

The first closeup pictures of Pluto will be priority though, right?

[Robotengineer]

The first closeup pictures of Pluto will be priority though, right?

I hope so, the public deserves something to look at, the scientists can wait.

[basic.syntax]

Yes absolutely, we will get to see something relatively quickly.

Image publication will lag behind downlink dates quoted below. Also note the warning, which doesn't recommend taking this copy/paste as the most accurate, last word on the subject. First images: selected from list, check the site for more:

Automatic release is promised within 48 hours of receipt .... I will update this post as necessary. Therefore' date=' I do not recommend the copying and reposting of this text, because it will become out of date!

[b']Sunday, July 12 19:39 UT / 15:39 ET / 12:39 PT: 7.5hr downlink: Final optical navigation images

• 3 LORRIs of Pluto at 13 km/pix (~185 pixels across disk)
  
• 2 LORRIs of Charon at 13 km/pix (~92 pixels across disk)
  

[...]

Tuesday, July 14 at 03:15 UT / Monday, July 13 at 23:15 ET / 20:15 PT: 0.9hr downlink: E-Health 1

• LORRI Pluto at 3.8 kilometers per pixel (~630 pixels across disk). Taken 2015-07-13 20:17:28. Range 768,000 km. - The best single-frame photo of Pluto that will be available during encounter period
  

Starting from the 14th (at latest,) I think we will start seeing new images cross-posted here. And more single images to come nearly every day, through the last "priority downlink" on the 20th. Some of them will fill the frame, components of a mosaic, but we will have to wait a while for the blanks to get filled in.

[Meithan]

I don't remember this being posted before. Here's a site maintained by the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where they are releasing LORRI images in raw form almost as soon as they're received on Earth:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/

[Frida Space]

I don't remember this being posted before. Here's a site maintained by the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where they are releasing LORRI images in raw form almost as soon as they're received on Earth:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/

Too bad we can't have the Ralph/MVIC pics in "real time" too.

[DMagic]

That reminds me of the differences in the ore maps between blobs, lines, and dots.

No commentary on that. It's just making me think.

That's because the dots use a higher quality interpolation when generating maps. I'm not sure why they do this, either method seems fast enough, but it causes the blob and line maps to not match up with the dot maps...

[Aethon]

Is there a giant crater on Pluto?

http://www.universetoday.com/121042/is-that-a-big-crater-on-pluto-pyramidal-mountain-found-on-ceres/

Edited June 30, 2015 by Aethon

[lajoswinkler]

Oh crap.

http://img06.deviantart.net/2f8b/i/2013/031/a/4/pixel_piranha_plant_by_kingsorahearts-d5lrqws.png

Edited June 30, 2015 by Red Iron Crown
Easy on the big reaction images, please.

[smjjames]

http://i2.wp.com/www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pluto-June-27-20.9mK-BaalkeProcess_L.jpg

Is there a giant crater on Pluto?

http://i2.wp.com/www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pluto-June29-Baalke-processing.png

http://i1.wp.com/www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Pluto-Charon-June-19-2015.jpg

http://www.universetoday.com/121042/is-that-a-big-crater-on-pluto-pyramidal-mountain-found-on-ceres/

Pyramidial? No, the correct term here is conical.

[Scotius]

And inside that enormous crater...a dead (?) Reaper

[Frida Space]

In case anyone's interested, a New Horizons Reddit AMA is about to begin.

Here are my own highlights from the previous AMA event.

[Frida Space]

Again, here is my personal selection of today's Reddit AMA with the New Horizons team:

What will be the maximum resolution available for LORRI panchromatic and MVIC color images?

The LORRI detector is a 1024x1024 detector that will be able to take images at up to about 80 meters per pixel on closest approach. The MVIC color is a little weirder in that it’s a scanning instrument rather than a single square imager. It has a 5024x128 pixel array for each of the four colors that it can take, but it’s on a different telescope, so the pixel scale will be a few hundred meters per pixel. [written by Stuart Robbins]

A picture of the night side of Pluto is planned using the reflected light from Charon, charonshine. How long is the exposure, how do you compensate for the movement?

You are correct that we will be looking both for Pluto’s reflected light on Charon and Charon’s reflected light on Pluto. To account for spacecraft motion, we are planning to take many images and combine them rather than take one long image. We don’t know if we will be successful, but we will be trying. Specifically, the Pluto in Charonlight will be taken with the MVIC instrument with a slow scan because the LORRI instrument will be busy with other observations. The Charon in Plutolight will be taken with the LORRI instrument, where about 130 images will be taken with exposures between 0.2 to 1.0 seconds. [written by Stuart Robbins]

What are your biggest worries for possible things going wrong with the flyby?

There are these thing called IMUs (inertial measurement units) on the spacecraft (we have two). The ones that were on the Stereo spacecraft were from the same batch as ours and they broke. :-( We can’t control that. The odds of both of them breaking would be bad. [written by Amanda Zangari]

How are you able to create true color images despite the lack of a green filter onboard New Horizons? Thanks.

Pluto’s spectrum is pretty boring in the visible, we can interpolate what the green should be, especially if we know what kind of ice we’re looking at. The blue and red channels include the green information which helps. The IR is harder to extrapolate, and actually tells us stuff about what Pluto is made up off (in conjunction with the methane), which is why we got that instead. [written by Amanda Zangari]

If you could use today's technology for instruments, computing and memory, how much of a difference would it have made in the way Pluto is observed by NH?

We’re limited in other ways, weirdly. For example, LORRI, our high resolution imager, has an 8-inch (20cm) aperture. The diffraction limit (how much an 8†telescope can magnify) is 3.05 mircorad. which is just over half the size of single pixel 4.95 microrad. So if we swapped out the current sensor with a higher res one, we couldn’t do much better because of the laws of physics. A bigger telescope would solve that problem, but then it would make the spacecraft heavier, which require more fuel to send to Pluto AND a longer time to get there, because the spacecraft is more massive. We launched Pluto on the largest, most powerful rocket available at the time (the Atlas V, with extra boosters), so again we’re limited by physics. [A person who actually knows about rockets should correct this]: “At the time†doesn’t mean best ever. The Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, was actually more powerful.

More megapixels also means more memory. For example, LORRI images are made up of a header and then the 1024x1024 array of numbers that make up our image and go from 0 to 65535 (216). There’s not really a way to make that info smaller if we went to 2048x2048. We could downlink a compressed version, but we want the full info eventually.

We could have a bigger hard drive. At some point either a very short time ago or a in the next few days [does someone know?], we’re wiping the entire hard drive in prep for the encounter. So having a larger hard drive would have been nice, and yeah we could use that, and today’s tech would probably get us a bigger one.. We are filling up said HD during the encounter. On the other hand, we will be downlinking stuff until the end of 2016, so bigger hard drive means we need the spacecraft to survive even longer to finish it (we are not planning on it breaking, but it’s a risk, so we are downloading a compressed version of everything, which will all be down in November, but think really lossy JPEGS).

Our downlink rate is actually limited by the spacecraft power. We have all the plutonium we could get our hands on, but there was actually a shortage at the time. As a result, even Voyager has a higher downlink rate then we do. :-( It’s still really cool we can run all our instruments with less power than an incandescent light would use.

So yeah, the things that would make our mission better, super smartphone tech can’t really fix. It’s all physics. And lack of Plutonium (We wants moar!!! Tell your congressfolk, we can’t go to the outer solar system on solar. Us planetary folk would love missions to Uranus and Neptune.) [written by Amanda Zangari]

[Frida Space]

New Horizons has performed its last TCM (Trajectory Correction Maneuver) before Pluto Flyby.

Stats: third Pluto-approach TCM, sixth TCM since 2006

Date: 3:01 am UTC, June 30th / 11:01 pm EDT, June 29th / 5:01 am CEST, June 30th

Delta-V: 27 cm/s (0.97 km/h)

Delta-T: 23s

Spatial correction: 184 km

Time correction: 20 seconds late

First TCM telemetry: 9:10 am UTC, June 30th / 5:30 am EDT, June 30th / 11:30 am CEST, June 30th

[Starwhip]

So I never knew Pluto had an atmosphere before... why didn't I know that?

(Or does it? I've heard it in four or five different sources...)