I thought I'd start a new thread for this:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/011007.htm
January 10, 2007
I didn't realize encounter will be up to June.
Do you have material yet to open such a topic for Roseta that will fligh by Mars on feb 27th?
Exciting times once again...
New Horizons launched on Jan 19th 2006 and will fly past Jupiter on Feb 28th.
Comet McNaught pass the orbit of Jupiter about 10 days after the NH Launch - and will be on the way back out, crossing the orbit of Venus when NH makes it's closest approach to Jupiter.
I don't think there's much chance of a competative race on the way back out again though
Doug
To Plutonian distances - McNaught is several years behind NH - quite something really.
Doug
How come NH is slowing down, now that it's approaching Jupiter? Its speed used to be 20+ km/s, but the last few weeks it's down to 19.9 km/s, and going slower by the day (currently 19.84 km/s). I'd think it would go faster and faster as it is pulled towards Jupiter.
The 'sphere of influence' for Jupiter hasn't been reached yet - the actual gravity assist period isn't very long.
Doug
Call it aphelium of the Hohmann orbit...
(ok, I've got some help from "The Basics of Spaceflight" for the orthograf, but what's wrong with that ?)
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/jan/HQ_07012_New_Horizons.html
RELEASE: 07-012
NASA/JHUAPL
January 18, 2007
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/011807.htm
January 18, 2007
Jupiter Flyby Press Kit (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/common/content/pdfs/011607_JupiterPressKit.pdf)
The Jupiter & Io LORRI photo caption mentions less turbulence in the Jovian Atmosphere than expected... can someone perhaps put Jupiters seasons in perspective, along with where in the Jovian year NH is vs. when Galileo was there?
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/JupiterAndIo.html
I didn't think Jupiter had seasons per se, since Jupiter (and its satellites) have only a negligible axial tilt. Jupiter's cloud belts and zones go through changes in albedo and amount of turbulence all the time, and I don't think they are tied to seasons. Compare images of Jupiter from the Pioneers, Voyagers, Hubble, Galileo, and now NH.
Did anyone else watch the press conference? I was sitting in my living room waiting for it to show up on NASA TV, but NASA TV resolutely continued showing archival footage of Apollo 11 up to and past 10 am. I ran to the NASA website and discovered that the press conference was being carried not on their "Public channel" but on their "media channel" -- I guess they now have two channels, which may allow them to put out more stuff, but DirecTV doesn't carry their media channel! Fortunately I figured it out in time and got a good stream on the media channel to watch it on my computer. That was scary for a minute, though.
I've http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000834/ the conference, but didn't mention one thing I found annoying -- a graphic showing New Horizons' speed through the encounter, which used only Imperial units. Of course American missions have to use Imperial units when they address the public, but it's irksome when they don't also include metric. I redrew the graphic with metric units, but didn't wind up using it for the blog, so I'll post it here.
--Emily
Helluva rollercoaster ride that.
Indeed...I guess New Horizons is now entering that part of the roller coaster ride that goes "tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick" up the first big hill...
--Emily
I missed it totally ( hope spaceflightnow.com put it up soon ) - but read on the blog that John was kind enough to mention (although thankfully for slashdot like reasons, not by name) the contribution some members here made in finding some nice Kodak moments
Doug
I will point out that in the "NASA Gallery" segments on NASA-TV during overnights, they often replay recent press conferences. Sometimes over and over.
So, it's quite possible that those with access to NASA-TV will be able to catch the press conference at some point this evening (or in the wee hours of tomorrow morning) in replay.
-the other Doug
Here you go, a minute and a half from the conference of John Spencer acknowledging the amateurs, recorded with my cruddy little voice recorder. Enjoy.
--Emily
Umm... is there a link to the native resolution version of that cool Jupiter and Io image? What's the point of providing a magnified "hi-res" image like that? If one were writing a wish-list, I'd put lossless PNGs as well, but let's not get greedy here
That's the advantage of NOT been able to get NasaTV other than with my computer
I watched most of the conference and I liked it very much. People were both very present and quite relaxed, just enjoying the conference and the start of the fly by; very confident in the plans as well as in the spacecraft. I realized that quite a part of the encounter has been developped pretty late. Did I get correctly when Alan said that they'll push NH capabilies during Jupiter fly by even MORE than it'll be pushed when it'll get to Pluto?
Go NH, go ( )
In some senses, Alan said, they were pushing the spacecraft: they have twice as many observations planned for the Jupiter flyby as for their current straw-man Pluto plan (each observation may consist of multiple measurements). He said that based upon the spacecraft's performance, they may increase or reduce the number of observations at Pluto. However, there are some things they'll be doing at Pluto that they won't at Jupiter. For instance, the Pluto plan will have "retargetable" blocks, points in the science plan where the science team can optionally choose different observations, depending upon what they see during approach. They didn't have time to plan that sort of thing for Jupiter.
--Emily
It is on Spaceflightnow.com as a MOV now (I don't know what I'd do without my subscription to that place) - I wonder how many kodak hendric moments made it into the sequencing.
Doug
That's a good question. It would seem unlikely that such a graph would be anything but spacecraft time, which would be UT, but I don't actually know.
--Emily
Pluto Mission News
January 19, 2007
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
Press Conference Replay
Missed the Jupiter flyby press conference on Jan. 18? Catch the replay this weekend on NASA TV! The event is scheduled to run on the NASA Media and Public channels at 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (Eastern Time) on both Saturday and Sunday (Jan. 20-21).
Click http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html for video links and schedule information.
This is a question for someone from the New Horizons team (Mr. Stern?): Could you publish (pdf) a detailed Jupiter encounter timeline (e.g. which instrument does what at a specific time, spacecraft turns, SSR data volume etc.)? Like the preliminary encounter document posted here last summer. Your flyby press kit is, well, for the general press , but not very detailed in respect to the encounter sequence. Thank you.
Analyst
I enjoyed watching the press conference live. Lots of great info and insights. And it was quite a nice kudo to see the welcome mat for amateurs as they pointedly encouraged suggestions for "kodak moments" and other observations
Plus brand new images and animations, most of which are available here.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/011807_pressGraphics.htm
ken
Not to moan at a joyous time, but damn that luck of Callisto and Ganymede being on the opposite side of Jupiter! Callisto could have been a huge looming disc for NH, and it ended up being almost worst-case faraway instead!
That 2nd poster is very nice ... something for the store ?
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/posters.php
Thank you so much John!! I'll see if I can produce a slimmed-down timeline to post on our website.
What are those Callirrhoe opnavs? Has New Horizons actually sighted its first non-Pluto KBO already?
--Emily
Callirrhoe is one of the newly discovered small outer satellites of Jupiter- we looked at it because it's about the same brightness as our KBO target is likely to be when we first pick it up on approach in 2019 or whenever. So it was a test of our ability to pick up a very faint moving target using long exposures.
A nice handfull of Kodak's - I'm really proud that UMSF was able to contribute in some tiny way - this will rank up there with the MOC Deimos observation in terms of wow factor.
Doug
I think these are Kodak moments where the time in MJD ties back to suggestions by hendric.
Line 031 54117.06319 Double shadow Transit
Line 034 54124.19514 Double shadow Transit
Line 110 54159.48961 IO Emerging from behind Jupiter
Line 143 54161.43332 Io/Europa conjunction
Line 165 54163.17200 Callisto emerging from behind Jupiter
Awesome. If I'm counting correctly the spreadsheet says these will take up 251Mbits of LORRI raw storage. Wow.
Line 110 54159.48961 IO Emerging from behind Jupiter
These shots represent around 0.5% of the total data return for the mission (in terms of bits of data returned). If you were to price all the bits returned by the mission equally then you could argue that these shots are worth around $30 million for the set.
I take it we're going to be getting high quality prints and expensive frames for them then?.
A brief word to all the NH lurkers on UMSF:
Keep up the good work! We're with you...
And post them images real soon now, OK?
Bob Shaw
I hope those Kodak moments come out well; I'm not sure how well the models show the edge of Jupiter's atmosphere. Seeing the refraction of the moons through the atmosphere will be pretty cool though!
Seeing the images starting to come in from this flyby has me missing Galileo...Jupiter, to me, is the most photogenic place in the solar system, with its dynamic weather and unique moons.
I know we send probes for science, and to answer questions, but I feel that visiting beautiful places is always a worthwhile endeavor.
Thank you very much for the timeline, John.
Analyst
How will the Jupiter flyby affect the speed of New Horizons?
Will it really become the fastest traveling spacecraft ever?
That's true but Helios remains in orbit around the Sun so despite having an exceptionally high sun relative velocity at perihelion it does not have enough oribital energy to leave the solar system. In that sense it is not as "fast" as NH which is on an escape trajectory (or will be once it gets that boost from Jupiter).
Exactly, if we're talking about highest speeds on equal terms, we should consider hyperbolic escape velocities.
And then Voyager 1 is and will remain the fastest.
Agree on escape trajectory, nevertheless, for the fun of it, what object was the fastest ever : could it be Jupiter's probe from Galileo ?
Bob, in that case it would be more fitting to talk about energy, not velocity, specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristic_energy. A smaller payload can get propelled faster so energies are a better way to directly compare things. Talking about speed is just a way to invoke that "oooh" factor in laymen, nothing else.
It's All Relative , anyway...
I've uploaded an audio recording of the press briefing for anyone who missed it:
http://www.cafesociety.uk.com/other/New-Horizons-Jupiter.mp3
(right-click on the link and select "Save Target As..." to download.
Perhaps one of these days NASA will create a searchable archive of NASA TV briefings (well I can dream...) :--)
This is perhaps the next best thing...
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php
#include standard_gripe_about_living_in_austin_hours_from_houston_and_STILL_NO_NASA_TV_ON
CABLE.h
Whereas we in Minneapolis get NASA-TV on our cable system, even though our cable system has been through two ownership changes in the past 10 years (local company Paragon bought by Time-Warner, which then sold out to Comcast in a shady "we'll give you this market if you give us another market" deal).
I'm told we get NASA-TV because one of the local high schools insists on having it available and actually uses its own satellite dish to pull it in. They then share the feed with the cable company. I was concerned that we would lose NASA-TV forever here when it went digital (requiring a somewhat pricey new decoder box to pull in), but it's still on 24/7 in Minneapolis proper.
Now, if we could just get the programmers in Houston to give us a little more variety in programming -- we seem to get an *awful* lot of the kiddie programming (including one called "An Astronaut's Life" or somesuch, which features Sunni Williams prominently with no explanation as to how she's on a stage at MSC and at the same time is the FE on the ISS... ). We also get nothing all night (at least some of the time) but interviews with the crew of whichever Shuttle flight is next up, which is fine -- except it's *all* they run overnight, sometimes, for several months prior to a flight. It gets a little old after the 40th or 50th time you've seen it.
I'm an old guy, I admit (51 years young last birthday), but I would really like to see more of the films made of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights back in the 60's and 70's. Every once in a while we get one of them, but not often enough for me...
However, it *is* nice to get the press conferences, even if I have to wait for them to be re-run sometimes. I was very pleased to see and hear Alan Stern and John Spencer, both active posters to our little forum, being so delightfully enthusiastic about the Jupiter encounter. I wonder a bit, though, if Alan's statement about how we just can't get as much science out of NH as possible because we can't afford a Voyager-sized staff for it might have been aimed at members of the new Congress...
-the other Doug
"#include standard_gripe_about_living_in_austin_hours_from_houston_and_STILL_NO_NASA_TV_ON
_CABLE.h"
Between that, and the totally <expletive deleted> analog cable service (we're not going to pay through the nose for digital cable AND renting several digital cable converter boxes)...
That's why we dumped Time Warner Cable and switched (by more or less a coin toss) to DirecTV. I'm not entirely happy with their image quality (It's entirely possible Dish Network is as bad) which I'm convinced is severely overcompressed on low viewership channels, but it's not full of bad-cable static that they could never fix, and it got is NASA TV just before the Mars Rovers arrived.
"...Perhaps one of these days NASA will create a searchable archive of NASA TV briefings..."
and PERHAPS NASA will <expletive deleted> the PIO slackers who post video after video on the all night NASA Gallery, including a Mariner-4 at Mars video I've been DYING to record since whenever... and utterly no schedule information, EVER.
rant
...........rave
.........................foam
.......................................gnaws at the edge of his monitor...
Helpful NASA-TV tip:
I TIVO 5 hours of it every day and then scan it at high speed at my convenience. I don't bother trying to keep track of their schedule, and if anything good turns up (like the NH Jupiter press conference) I can watch it, and if I want, can burn a DVD of it too.
Directv doesn't make TIVO recievers anymore, but their DVR will do pretty much the same thing, and in any regard, TIVO stand alone units can be 'grafted' onto Directv, Dish, and most cable system boxes.
Hi folks-
The "raw" Jupiter encounter LORRI images are now being posted as JPEGs at a public web site http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/. Actually, they are not quite raw- they have already been flat-fielded and desmeared (the originals have readout smear, as LORRI doesn't have a shutter). Most of the images should show up here eventually, though it's not an automatic pipeline like MER and Cassini, so please be patient.
Enjoy!
John.
Hooray!
Anyone want to take a crack at assembling those Jupiter rotation movies? I'm at the Phoenix landing site meeting and must listen to Mars stuff right now!
--Emily
Off-topic, but let us know how the Phoenix landing site meeting goes, Emily. As if that's something to forget writing about
The new PI Perspective is up.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
Just 35 days until closest approach...
It's interesting to see small detail on the Galilean Satellites even from this distance. Pluto science Looks very promising!
Just 3 HB to launch 1kg to LEO (or 10 to GTO) ?
I hope no teenagers (AKA 'The Great Unwashed') have been reading the Hot Bath observations; they can now point out that sitting slumped in front of the TV (unwashed) for a fortnight is as green as having only one bath. I forsee major domestic issues here...
Bob Shaw
Don't worry, Bob. It's also a quality of life indicator. My figures suggest that the US energy use for 1999 (the last year I could reliably get in a few minutes' googlin') equates to 1 HB per capita every twenty minutes.
And yes, Rakhir, that is the energy to orbit. Not much. Just "difficult".
Andy
It is the craft to leave Earth with the highest relative velocity, but my understanding is that became moot not too long after launch. I was told by a couple of the project guys that NH will never catch Voyager (1 at least), however I'm not sure I see why as NH is currently travelling at the highest speed away from the sun of any spacecraft escaping the solar system.
Bit of an anim of I think four consecutive Jols ( Jovian Sols???)
Doug
Lovely!
The PI Perspective notes that we haven't seen "brown barges" like we saw during Voyager, but could we be seeing some in the southern hemisphere? Note the dark elongated feature south of the GRS here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003113/lor_0031138439_0x630_sci_1.jpg
You can see dark material swirling around the GRS from about 7 O'clock anti-clockwise to about 3 O'clock - very cool
Doug
http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.pl
Yes, we'll slow after Jupiter. See the Press Kit on the JHUAPL web site front page for the numbers.
As to V1 and V2 comparisons to NH, you'll have to scare those numbers up for yourself, I think.
-Alan
I just asked Mark Showalter at the PDS Rings Node if they were going to incorporate New Horizons into their Jupiter viewer. Turns out they already have a separate http://pds-rings.seti.org/tools/viewer2_jupnh.html and http://pds-rings.seti.org/tools/ephem2_jupnh.html, which I hadn't noticed before. The Viewer is very handy to get a prediction of how the planet, satellites, and rings will look to the ORS instruments at different times during the encounter. To get the field of view you want using the viewer:
LORRI's FOV is square at 1044 arcsec
The slit of the Alice spectrometer is 14438 arcsec long (it's only 350 arcsec wide)
MVIC panoramas are 20626 arcsec wide and whatever number they want long
LEISA's FOV is square at 3280 arcsec.
...I think. I calculated these based on the FOV numbers given at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/instruments.html.
Have fun.
--Emily
Here's a simplified and slightly updated version of the Jupiter observation timeline...
jupiter_timeline_static.xls ( 114.5K )
: 867
John.
And new images added to the SOC gallery up to the 21st.
Doug
Two satellites and two shadows !
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003130/lor_0031303982_0x630_sci_1.jpg
Here is a rotation movie for January 21:
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/New_Horizons/Jan21_movie.gif
The moon that crosses that transits during the first half of the movie (and casts a shadow on Jupiter) is Europa, while Io makes a brief, one frame appearance.
Based on the approximate orbital velocity of Pluto at encounter, and the total relative velocity of NH and Pluto at encounter, I (awhile back) derived a velocity of ~12.7 km/s for NH at Pluto. Assuming that's correct, that puts NH well above the velocities of P10 and P11 (at 12.1 and 11.5 km/s, respectively), but far below either of the Voyagers (at 15.6 km/s for V2 and 17.1 km/s for V1).
For those a little more bored than I, one can calculate the "loss distance" of NH from P10 and P11, based on the difference in velocities. Lessee...NH will be moving at about 2.7 AU/yr. once she passes Pluto. That means she'll be gaining 1.2 AU/yr. relative to P11, and 0.6 AU/yr. relative to P10. That isn't as much as it sounds; if my numbers are right, NH won't catch up with P11 until ~2066 (at 138 AU), and not to P10 until ~2151 (at 367 AU).
For the record, in 2066, the Voyagers will be at:
V2: 250 AU
V1: 286 AU
In 2151:
V2: 531 AU
V1: 592 AU
Feel free to check my figures, all.
Why do these NH images look somewhat blurrier than Cassini's comparable NAC frames? Does LORRI have a greater PSF? I'm judging by the sharpness of the moons' discs to be clear.
Got some side by side comparisons?
Doug
Not at the moment, I'm at work, but I'll try to dig up some Cassini PDS ones for comparison later. It might be subjective, but I do get the feeling LORRI has a slightly wider PSF.
It may be true of course, and I think LORRI is a narrower FOV than either of the CICLOPS pair - but of course comparing JPGs with PDS IMG's isn't a true comparison.
Hopefully John or Alan will comment.
Doug
It's true, LORRI is a much smaller and simpler camera than the Cassini NAC, and the PSF isn't quite so sharp. The high-frequency information is there, however, and the images can be sharpened nicely (though with increased noise).
I read in "http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/papers/SCMsnDe/morgan_cal_5906B_50.pdf" by Morgan et al. that LORRI has "a PSF FWHM of 1.5 pixels with little variation across the FOV..."
PSF = Point Spread Function; FMHM = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_width_at_half_maximum.
And from the http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/cassini_orbiter/coiss_1001/catalog/issna_inst.cat: "The NAC point spread function (PSF) was designed to be approximately the same physical size as a pixel in the near-IR. The full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the PSFs of the NAC through the clear filters is 1.3 pixels."
Why would the FWHM be wider through the clear filters than the IR?
To compare the masses, the http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/instruments-cassini-iss.cfm. Anyone have a guess as to what fraction of that the NAC makes up? LORRI is only http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons!
--Emily
Here's the comparison between LORRI and ISS NA I promised. It shows Ganymede from lor_0031303982_0x630_sci_1.jpg. I used a Cassini frame (N1351684677_2.IMG) of approximately the same pixel scale, meaning taken from a distance of 56.7 mil. km as opposed to 68 mil. km due to LORRI's smaller FOV (0.29 vs 0.35 deg). Unfortunately there was no clear-filtered image at around this time so I used a GRN filter for Cassini. This might give a slightly sharper image than the entire passband would. The JPG artifacting is IMHO negligible in the NH image. The middle set was "sensibly" sharpened to bring out most details without producing strong edge ringing. Magnified 4x. The two views probably show opposing hemispheres so no similar features are visible.
Comparing ISS NAC with its 30.5 kilogram mass and peak power of 26 W to LORRI really shows the latter's sure one capable camera, even if having a slightly fuzzier image! Not to mention sensitivity, 3 ms exposures are more typical of what Cassini's WAC used at Jupiter, NAC used several tens of ms.
EDIT: Added simulated views using Solar System Simulator to show rough albedo features.
Cassini NAC is a reflector telescope and I don't see any obvious refracting elements in its design (such as field flattening optics) so where would chromatic aberration come from? Maybe the design simply optimizes for focus using the IR filters (they do, after all affect focus ever-so-slightly) so using no filter (clear frame) produces a slight defocus. Diffraction/wavelength effects would make longer wavelengths more blurred, contrary to this behaviour, right?
I know the WAC uses a special "clear" filter that improves focus over the visible wavelengths since it's basically an old Voyager WAC optics design.
EDIT: Correction, there appear to be field corrector optics and the window of the CCD package in the NAC. Chromatic aberration might be the sole reason for the PSF variation.
-----
Back on topic... A question for John or Alan: What are the maximum exposures for LORRI without saturating various targets at Jupiter, at these approach phase angles? I see a typical exposure is 3 ms. The difference between 4 ms and 2 ms seems to be quite a bit less noise in the former case. Is the only reason such low exposures are used to avoid overexposure (say at Europa / Io)?
New Horizons was 50 million kilometers away from Jupiter at 2007-01-28 13:09:38 UTC.
Planetary Radio
NEW HORIZONS APPROACHES JUPITER!
Airdate: Monday, January 29, 2007
http://planetary.org/radio/show/00000221/
For comparison purposes I did a a montage of global images from all of the spacecraft that have flown by Jupiter and imaged it (Galileo is omitted because there is no low phase global coverage):
Cool montage, Bjorn!
Are these all clear-filter images? Are there differences in these images attributable to what bandpasses the cameras were sensitive to?
--Emily
I forgot to specify the filters - they have been added into my original message.
The different filters account for some of the differences but the effect is probably minor. I have found that clear-filter images are more similar to green-filter images than to red and blue images. This is especially true of red features like the GRS.
There has been an update on the "New Horizons Science Operations Center" OR NOT?!?!
I really don't know...now...
This morning I opened that page and I saw some new images (more than 10) taken on 24th January ,saved it than clicked "BACK" and there was no new images anymore including the one that I just saved...
I tried everything that I know to get that new images page back but it's just gone!!!
Maybe I'm imagining things or dreamed it but there are now 56 images of Jupiter on "New Horizons SOC"
and I have 57 on my HDD...!?!
Here is that extra image I'm talking about:
Is this a rogue pixel, or one of the smaller, inner moons?
Noise. NH is still too far out to resolve anything except the Galileans. If that were a real feature, it would be slightly smudged over more than 1 pixel due to the point spread function.
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?tbody=599&vbody=-98&month=1&day=21&year=2007&hour=17&minute=45&fovmul=1&rfov=0.5&bfov=30&porbs=1&showsc=1
The view at the time of the picture ( roughly )
Doug
Toma B-- More images will be posted as they are received. The SOC description page is under development and is planned for permanent posting this week.
-Alan
The GRS is known to exhibit a stronger red color when the South Equatorial Belt is whitish (Pioneer images) than when it is brownish (Voyager images) so this is probably the main reason for its different appearance in the Pioneer and Voyager images.
Here is an animated gif covering the time period from 2007-01-21 19:42:01 UTC to 2007-01-22 05:42:01 UTC. The moon moving from right to left at the beginning of the animation is Callisto. Io makes a cameo appearance at the end of the movie.
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/New_Horizons/Jan21-22_movie.gif
Attached are two views of Io taken last week by New Horizons. For each image, I have magnified the image by 1000%, using bicubic (top view) and Nearest-Neighbor (bottom view) interpolation. For each image, I included a simulated view from the http://space.jpl.nasa.gov. Large scale features such Bosphorus Regio and Colchis Regio are starting to come into view, along with the non-sense surrounding Isum Patera.
We need an Io orbiter... if it were technically possible that is.
I don't think you'll see volcanopele arguing with that suggestion.
--Emily
Oh Ya? We need a Europa orbiter!
Cameras on spacecraft often have to trade off between spatial and spectral resolution, and LORRI and Ralph are no exception. The incoming photos have all been from LORRI with its superior long range capabilities. But as we approach Jupiter, can we expect any “combination image products” from New Horizons in the same vein as HiRISE/CRISM on MRO or ISS/VIMS from Cassini, or are the focusing conditions and fields of view too disparate?
http://crism.jhuapl.edu/gallery/featuredImage/current/featuredImage20061213_2.php
http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1111
It seems it should be possible to combine LORRI detail images with MVIC color. MVIC's field of view is 20 times broader than LORRI's, but its CCD is almost 5 times broader, so in fact MVIC's resolution is only four times coarser than LORRI's, which is not bad.
To get a handle on when targets are going to be observed by both MVIC and LORRI, you can check out the http://planetary.org/explore/topics/new_horizons/jupiter_timeline.html I'm working on. It's based on John's spreadsheet. It's not done yet -- I need to add much more in the way of explanation, and I'm going to put in some illustrations of NH's position at the start of each day (thanks for the suggestion Doug) -- but I figure you guys won't mind seeing the work in progress.
--Emily
Cool, I wonder if it is even worth it to try to see if I can find Callirrhoe in the Jan. 10 images....
CLOSING IN
Far behind now: blue-white world,
Waterworld, world of feathered clouds and
Oceans deep, steep, snow-capped mountains
And deserts of powdered amber.
Ahead, above, beneath, all around: blackness,
Ebony abyss studded with sequin stars
Bisected by mottled vapour trail – the
Sun-frothed spine of the Milky Way.
A year of nothing. Waiting. Watching
The dark get darker as Earth’s glow
Slowly fades o’er my shoulder.
And then…
Ahead: a glint of gold.
A yellow grain among the dust.
It grows.
A yellow peppercorn now, how bright
It seems against the void.
It grows…
A butterscotch-hued bead now,
Sewn onto the star-embroidered cloak
Of night…
What a sight suddenly! A marble
Now, dipped in caramel
With toffee whirls and honey swirls
Streaked across its face.
I rush on silently, imagining
Stars streaking past in Enterprise style,
Hearing the solar wind howling in my ears
As I close in on –
A tiger-striped ball now, fat with cloud,
Bloated and branded with auburn bands
And strands of coffee-coloured haze
Dotted with cinnamon spots –
And still it grows…
© Stuart Atkinson 2007
Emily's blog-in-progress:
"Blah Blah..."
Hmm, now I know what my students feel like...
This is really useful - what a great encounter! And in case people don't know about this, here is one of the goals of the Europa terminator mapping - extending the map of these 'crop circles':
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2005/pdf/2081.pdf
Phil
Blah Blah is so much better than the random Latin text that egomaniac typesetters and marketing experts use
Doug
Lorem ipsum isn't actually truly sensible Latin, though it's based on Latin. If I'd felt like taking the time I could even have used the online http://www.lipsum.com/.
Hope to have a major update done on this in a couple of hours...
--Emily
Thanks again, Emily. It's really nice and very easy to follow, and it gives you a clear idea of what cameras/spectrometers will be used in tandem. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the preview Emily, but I couldn't help but be reminded of this Far Side cartoon:
At that, the dog understands a lot more than my daughter does
The "blah blah" is gone; I've uploaded my update, with some illustration and some more explanatory text. Check it out! It'll probably get tweaked one last time before I blog it. Please feel free to send me an email with any comments or suggestions.
--Emily
I think the pics from Dave's simulator are a master stroke. Whoever thought of adding those is a genius.
In all seriousness - it takes Johns XLS, and makes it suitable for public consumption - great work.
I don't know how good the New Horizons trajectory is for Celestia, but if it's any good - I'll do a movie of it.
Doug
There are a few more images posted on the SOC page, up to Jan 24 and a range of 57 million km. Albedo features are slowly becoming resolvable on the moons. I wonder why the north on Jupiter is not up (or left) in these images, but somewhat tilted, does the S/C use the celestial north pole instead? A couple of frames targeting a specific moon do seem to have Jovian north aligned to a spacecraft axis on the other hand.
EDIT: Curious, the images have disappeared again. Oh well, they'll be back.
Probably just the attitude of the spacecraft when imaging - it doesn't really matter Perhaps there is some sort of alignment involved for the other instruments to sweep across the disk?
Doug
That's cool. Seems convincing on first look. Spencer-- You're Dr. Io. What do you think?
-Alan
I've a feeling these are artifacts resulting from the sharpening process, unfortunately. Ustrax's images did prompt me to go back to our orignal data and look at the Io images more closely, but so far I haven't been able to confirm those features. Not quite done though- I'll look a bit further.
John
Is that even Io? Check out my post on Io earlier: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=3743&view=findpost&p=82165
If ustrax has the right hemisphere according to his reference image, the most prominent feature in the image should Bosphorus Regio, which should appear bright near the center of the disk. Media Regio oddly appears brighter than Bosphorus, which doesn't make any sense.
No, it's "Io my soul to the company store"
(Sixteen Tons...)
Phil
That's a more catchy description than the one where the 1970's era newscaster pronounced Io as "ten."
For comparison, rotate Ustrax's sharpened image 90 degrees clockwise (or there abouts) and compare to this simulated view from the Solar system simulator:
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?tbody=503&vbody=-98&month=1&day=24&year=2007&hour=04&minute=40&rfov=1&fovmul=-1&bfov=30&porbs=1&showsc=1
The bright spot at upper right in Ustrax's sharpened view is caused by the bright rays radiating from the crater Osiris.
Are you sharpening the image before or after the enlargement? It seems like artifacts from too much sharpening applied afterwards?
What do you mean by it softens it alot? By moiré what exactly do you mean? Edge ringing? I wouldn't really sharpen the images beyond the point of trying to reverse the point spread function, which is 1.5 pixels FWHM. I tend to use Photoshop's smart sharpen filter with radius 0.7-0.8 pix and it gives good results. Any more processing could "introduce" details, not bring them out.
Hehe
The obvious problem I see are those vertical/horizontal bars that appear and those are clear signs you did the sharpening after the resize. By softening up I guess you mean Corel Draw (why even use it for a purpose like this!) magnifies the crop and then you end up enhancing resize algorithm artifacts.
And no, I have no idea what Corel's moiré removal does!
Ustrax, what ugordan is trying to say is that many of the features you see in your sharpened view were introduced by the sharpening process. In other words, they are not real. There are simply not enough pixels to be seeing features on the scales you are seeing in your image. Sure, I would like to, but we just have to be a little more patient.
Here's my take on the latest Io image. It flips between the LORRI image and Sol. Sys. Simulator image. Magnified 4x:
It's just a try to make an anaglyph with NH images
(the relief is not so pronounced...).
Well, Ant103, you can't expect two consecutive images taken 3 seconds (!) apart to show any change. Not at this range.
Three seconds... geez, Cassini's cameras really are slow!
EDIT: Due to popular demand, here's the Ganymede flicker (flipper ?):
Some new approach charts have been added to this page.
http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.pl
Quite an update with easy to understand charts.
40 million km and one Earth-Moon distance to Jupiter
New Horizons will be soon exactly 40,000,000 kilometers away from Jupiter at 2007-02-03 18:30:45 UTC.
http://magicnumber.sourceforge.net/
One of Jupiters irregular satellites, 2003 J3 is 40047567 km for Jupiter at its most distant (apojove?). New Horizons is now closer than this.
Alan, your post brings up perhaps the only physically "meaningful" milestone right now -- entering Jupiter's sphere of influence. Since it has a radius of 48 million km, we're already well into Jupiter's domain.
Let the gravitational roller coaster ride begin!
Alan has a weblog on the US Astronomy magazine website http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=5108, and discusses entering Jupiter's sphere of influence.
Thanks for pointing out that blog...
Interesting upcoming event this weekend as next Saturday (February 10), LORRI will take its best full-disk portrait of Jupiter, just before the giant planet fills the camera's field of view.
I see we have another update:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/020907.htm
Title and first paragraph are:
SWAP Observes Solar Wind Interactions at Jupiter
A little over a year since launch, with its sights firmly on Jupiter, the New Horizons spacecraft is testing its science payload and making observations as it rounds the planet for a gravity-assist that will speed its journey to the edge of the solar system. As the spacecraft approaches the planet, the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument is already generating data that will help resolve puzzling questions about the interactions between the solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of ionized gas flowing out from the Sun, and Jupiter's magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds the planet and encloses ionized gas.
.
.
.
[I just love the timely, frequent, and informative updates!]
--Greg
2007-02-09 23:46:31
New Horizons is now no more than 30,000,000 kilometers away from Jupiter.
There is another John S update from yesterday here:
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=5108
Sounds like the calm before the storm.
Here is a quick and dirty attempt at showing what Jupiter might look like if NH could image it in color:
I imagine the last 'full disc' LORRI frame will be out soon.
Doug
There is something quite funny about the last observation while LORRI can fit Jupiter into a single frame being taken as a mosaic of four frames
Had a hack at it myself...and resized the finished thing to 1024 x 1024 for good luck
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/jupiterNH.jpg
EDITED:
Original images:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003342/lor_0033420927_0x630_sci_1.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003342/lor_0033420922_0x630_sci_1.jpg
Emily made a good point in her blog - perhaps it was a case of not wanting to blind lorri by having the whole disc filling the sensor at one time - or simply that the be sure they got the whole disk they simply 'framed' the target with four frames.
Doug
I don't know about blinding the sensor, but there could be a point there in reducing noise due to readout smear. You have more black space to remove and possibly the readout smear noise doesn't accumulate as much (it's cumulative from one line to the other) as when you have a bright target.
Why Cassini did this I still don't realize as the required pointing accuracy was well within the limits for the narrow-angle camera. NH attitude accuracy is also very sufficient to accurately target stuff.
When Hubble spends 20 orbits on Jupiter near closest approach, we may get some great color overlays.
Ted
I was going through Emily's New Horizons Jupiter Encounter timeline, and I noticed that there are several observation opportunities for the moons Elara (4 obs.) and Himalia (6 obs.). These two are the only non-Galilean moons observed.
I'm just curious, why were these two moons given that much attention? Was it simply orbital dynamics and that no other (non-Galilean) moon was near New Horizons during the Jupiter flyby?
It states that at closest point, Elara will be 29 km per pixel and Himalia will be 27 km per pixel. How does this compare with previous missions? I believe Cassini made an observation of Himalia before.
I don't know this for sure but I'd hazard a guess that the main point of the Himalia and Elara observations is as practice for the sequences designed for tracking and observing small KBOs.
--Emily
Any chance of some spectral analysis of Himalia and Elara?
Maybe they are wandering KBOs . . . .
That feature right on the limb isn't a storm, it's a funky cloud pattern. You can see it here above and to the right of RSjr:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/HighRes/020707_6maps.gif
Looking at the gif and the new mosaic, is RSjr set to eat the oval directly to it's left? Maybe we'll get lucky and NH can watch the festivities...
Here's a blast from the past...Man, I wish we had a Jupiter orbiter!
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA02863.gif
Will NH only make Black-and-White images at Pluto as well?
The Himalia and Elara objectives center on phase curves and shape determinations.
-Alan
Interesting discussion on the outer moons, but just a question, where the "asteroid-moons" Himalia + Elara + Lysithea + Leda imaged by any of the 6 precursor missions ?
The official version of the February 10 mosaic is now available:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/021307_1.html
Alan: Congratulations on your new role! I feel better about our government already. :-)
--Greg
Actually Himalia was a few pixels across in the Cassini images:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Himalia
Not exactly the most interesting images in the world but sufficient to reveal Himalia's size.
Greetings,
I see this NH Jupiter movie at the following URL:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/020707_1.html
Looks nice. I wonder if it can be further post-processed to have some of the improved time interpolation and zonal wind correction we'd seen in some of the Cassini Jupiter movies. I suppose Bjorn's colorization techniques might be applied as well. That's a bit of a wish list, isn't it?
Pluto Mission News
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
February 15, 2007
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
Pluto Mission News
February 21, 2007
"Sure the Pluto system is eight years away, but when I watched a movie last weekend on TV from 1999, I realized that eight years seemed like yesterday. So onward we go — it's a long but worthy haul to the frontier that is the Kuiper Belt."
That's our Alan!
We're almost there!
Updates from the PI here and here:
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=5108
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
Here is an article from the Baltimore Sun.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-hs.horizons23feb23,0,4671616.story?coll=bal-health-headlines
John Spencer just sent me a glog, including Alice data from Jupiter!! And a new Hubble image of Io with something erupting!!!!!
(I'm excited. )
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000874/
--Emily
Me too! Thanks, Emily. Bet that volcanopele's bouncing off the walls...
I vaguely remember some ideas of a planetary space telescope (~1 meter aperture? - I don't remember), probably about 10 years ago. Could have been very useful although Earth-based telescopes with adaptive optics can perform miracles.
A completely different topic: Does anyone know if SPICE kernels (or to be specific: SPK kernels) for NH are available somewhere? I've searched the PDS NAIF node but didn't find anything. I was going to do an animation of the NH Jupiter flyby.
New Horizons has been launched so they definitely exist. Fortunately I was able to get the information needed here:
http://pds-rings.seti.org/tools/ephem2_jupnh.html
A bit more messy for me than using the SPICE kernels directly but the result was equivalent:
http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/new_horizons/jup_nh_flyby_aa.avi (4 MB)
This animation starts 7.5 million km from Jupiter on February 24 2007 00:00:00 and ends 7.5 million km from Jupiter on March 4 2007 11:30:00. The field of view is 5 degrees. The animation includes the Galilean satellites. The starfield is fictional. I made no attempts to make the transit times of Jovian cloud features like the Great Red Spot accurate. The Jupiter texture map is based on Cassini images.
EDIT: Bad URL fixed, the animation can now be downloaded.
The latest http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php is up. Very exciting times!
"Today, we're studying atmospheric composition and structure of both Io and Callisto, mapping the surface compositions of Ganymede and Europa, searching for embedded moonlets in Jupiter's rings, obtaining high-resolution images of the Little Red Spot on Jupiter, imaging Io's volcanic plumes, and obtaining ring images to study the phase-angle behavior of their dust. We're also sending home eight hours of downlink data. All the while, we're studying Jupiter's magnetosphere. By late tomorrow we'll be at closest approach, but there are still twice as many observations tomorrow as we're making today!"
Thanks Björn for sharing that Jupiter flyby weblink... I'm curious to see what we'll hear from NH after the observations are finished by the end of June 2007... It's another 8 years to Pluto!
Exciting times indeed!
In the latest PI perspective, Alan Stern comments about the Boeing Star-48 upper booster stage which is cruising along on a similar trajectory to New Horizons. I wonder if there is any possibility of spotting this from New Horizons. It just brings to my mind one of the experiments proposed to study the pioneer anomaly, where an actively controlled and communicating mother spaceship travels along with a free-floating test mass. Since there are no active propulsion or thermal systems on the test mass, a large category of the mundane explanations for the anomaly are ruled out in studying the test mass's motion. Most likely the Star-48 stage is unsuitable for this purpose, but I wonder... :^)
I wouldn't be surprised if the Star-48 stage is very unsuitable for this (but I would be happy to be wrong).
Any residual solid fuel in the casing might be outgassing and perturbing the trajectory. And this might be happening kind of randomly as it is probably spinning and tumbling and therefore is not thermally stable. Also, any plastics or fibreglas materials might also be outgassing too. IIRC, the thermal re-radiation might perturb the course too, and if it is spinning (nutating?) this might be another variable.
If the booster was put into a stable spin and a known orientation, and it stayed that way after NH deployment, maybe it would be suitable . . .
. . . with a laser retro-reflector and a dedicated instrument on NH to watch it.
Given that the Star-48 is roughly half a million kilometers away it is well beyond the ability of NH to detect so this isn't practical unfortunately.
Closest approach to Jupiter occurred at 05:43:40 UTC Feb 28th, at a speed of 22.86 km/s. NH came to within 2.3 million km of Jupiter's center.
At 06:07:12 UTC, NH reached yet another milestone when it reached 800 million km from the sun. Now, it's on to Pluto! NH is currently 3.937 million km from Pluto. Later!
J P
Sorry, may be this is a stupid question, or someone else already mentioned it, but I did not find any mention about it:
I know that they are strict trajectory constraints to send the probe to Pluto, but at the time of the closest approach, almost all the moons are on the opposite side of Jupiter. It is especially the case for Callisto.
Wouldn't it have been possible to adjust the timing (few days) to get a better configuration ?
Marc.
I asked the same question after launch. I think John Spencer said that the minute the spacecraft launched they knew the date of Jupiter closest approach to an accuracy of a few hours and there was no maneuvering space to adjust on a timescale of days. The Pluto aimpoint keyhole obviously is a narrow one.
New mosaic: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/022807_3.html
Also:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/022807_2.html
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/022807_1.html
The turbulence to the west bears a very obviously striking resemblance to the GRS pre-2007. Hope that the similarities are useful in lieu of the studies planned for the now-invisible patterns near her big sister.
Can someone tell me when NH will start slowing down again ? yoahua's webpage shows NH still accelerating.
Thanks.
Some more images available.
Little Red:
Here's a montage of the three Galileans. Smart sharpen applied to combat PSF blur and, of course, massively increase noise in the process. Magnified 2x.
Just a quick question - all the images so far have been black & white (monochrome), does anyone know if NH is fitted with different filters so color photos can be made too?
Thanks.
All the images so far are from the LORRI camera which is panchromatic so no color can be expected. NH does carry another instrument capable of color, the MVIC camera but it's a lower resolution instrument and is too sensitive to be used on sunlit surfaces at Jupiter. There will be color observations after closest approach, mainly looking at night sides and using jupitershine.
We can expect color releases, but nothing as spectacular as Cassini did.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/022807.htm
JHU/APL
February 28, 2007
QUOTE“We’re on our way to Pluto,” says New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “The swingby was a success; the spacecraft is on course and performed just as we expected.”
i guess a comma and a period where mixed up
slightly OT but as to comma/period mix ups, that's a whole 'nother area for international confusion that's almost but not quite as bad as the SI\Imperial thing. My kids use commas where I use periods and vice versa when it comes to writing large numbers and decimal parts. I just assumed that Planet X intended that to mean three thousand and whatnot million km and not 3 point whatnot million km.
I know. I still got a good laugh out of it. If only we were 3 million km from Pluto...
According to Space Reference, the velocity of New Horizons relative to the sun peaked at 22.85 m/s, which is about 1.8% less than the peak velocity predicted in Emily's chart - which also appears to be based upon the June ephemeris(?)
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.nl.html?pid=23490
This may be a stupid question, but does the peak velocity coincide with the moment of closest approach, or is there still acceleration going on after that, while the spacecraft is still pretty deep in the planet's gravity well?
My charts are based on the ones that John Spencer was developing for science planning, so they should be as up to date as anything.
--Emily
If we're talking about heliocentric velocity it might be possible to have the greatest velocity after C/A due to them being vectors. I'm not exactly sure. Jupiter-relative velocity should be highest just at C/A. I don't think it's a stupid question at all, these kinds of things aren't always intuitive.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/11/
News Release Number: STScI-2007-11
March 1, 2007 10:00 AM (EST)
Nice! I noticed the two box images taken in UV are two-filtered, taken some time (a couple of mins?) one after the other, based on color fringing of white ovals in the south. Looking at the north pole then, the brightest streaks align very well, but faint auroral emissions seen in blue and red don't evenly match. This suggests the auroral emission dances around quite a bit on a timescale of minutes.
If human eye could see it, that'd probably be a cool sight.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/jupiter
Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center
March 1, 2007
Pluto Mission News
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
March 1, 2007
Can someone tell what is the feature appearing in the end of http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/HighRes/020707_6maps.gif at 30º Lat and 90º Long?
Is it from Jupiter or a moon? It only appears in the end...
Thanks.
It's either Io or Europa. I'd go with Europa.
there's an accompanying shadow at 170 longitude, so that seems a moon to my unexperienced eye. dunno which one
For what it's worth, the Little Red Spot and gal sat images have all been added to the http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/...of course, all most of these have already been released in processed form. According to yesterday's glog from John there won't be any more coming down from the spacecraft for "about a week." There are two more frames from the Io observation with shorter exposures -- maybe some of you magicians can try to process a version that shows both the dayside and the nightside detail simultaneously.
EDIT: I just noticed four frames from the 21st showing Jupiter's limbs. Odd! Those aren't on my timeline.
EDIT AGAIN: I just got an explanation of those limb pics from Joe Peterson at SwRI: "These were intentionally aimed off-Jupiter center for testing the camera (so just the limb shows), but they do show the scale and proximity to Jupiter nicely!"
--Emily
FYI, qualitative physics is hard to get results with and quantitative physics is just plain no fun (and in the three body situation, unsolvable), but if you'd like an existence proof that maximum velocity needn't occur at closest approach, imagine a satellite in a distant elliptical orbit around Neptune. Nereid will do. It has an orbital velocity with respect to Neptune varying from 0.4 km/s to 3.0 km/s. Neptune has an orbital velocity of 5.4 km/s.
If the node of Nereid's orbit were such that its top velocity were subtractive from the Neptune-Sun velocity, but the slowest velocity were additive, then it would be moving at 2.4 km/s WRT the Sun at closest approach to Neptune, but 5.8 km/s WRT the Sun at apoapsis. (Imagine that the apoapsis were 180 degrees away from the Sun from Neptune's perspective and that the orbit were prograde and in the ecliptic... this is a gedankenexperiment anyway.)
That's a much more profound case than possible with a hyperbolic orbit (WRT the planet), but the same principle applies. The Jupiter encounter bends NH's path to be less radial. As that bending occurs, NH's great speed WRT Jupiter is added to its speed WRT the Sun. In the short run around C/A, NH will neither gain nor lose much speed WRT the Sun nor Jupiter, but the bending makes their two effects more additive than orthogonal. So it makes sense that at least on some tiny time scale the speed immediately after C/A would be greater than the speed the same interval before C/A. That's too hand-wavy, of course, to tell whether the lag would be a picosecond or a day, but maximum speed WRT the Sun should be *some* interval after C/A for all such gravity assists.
Did my hands stop waving long enough for this to make sense to anyone?
Here's my attempt to merge the best of both worlds, the sunlit crescent and nightside:
Very good Ugordan
Here my attempt to an HDR on Io :
Here's my version of the Little Red Spot mosaic from the raws. The images were high-passed to remove any light gradients, and then unsharpened to enhance cloud feature contrast. Finally, a synthetic light gradient was created and put into the picture, to retain the original look.
Lots of details visible... impressive!!!
http://img403.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lrsio0.jpg
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMTUJN0LYE_index_0.html
ESA
2 March 2007
Oops!
(this learn me to read too fast... -_-)
Hi,
I'm a bit wondering about pics - or say better one pic - from Jupiter's outermost giant moon Callisto.
Why wasn`t it put on the agenda for this prereleased images series? Probably being too far away?
This preview implements something different - Callisto appearing a bit larger than Europa.
Nice here, the comparison between LORRI, LEISA and MVIC image scales - that's why we won't see any spectecular color images by MVIC!
Bye.
New PI's Perspective March 5, 2007
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
http://planetary.org/radio/show/00000226/
Planetary Radio
Monday, March 5, 2007
Guests:
John Spencer, New Horizons science team member
Alan Stern, Principal Investigator, New Horizons
P.S. Check out the http://planetary.org/explore/topics/planetary_radio_trivia/. And no, the answer is not prairie dog burrows in Jason's back yard in Kansas
NH observation of Jupiter's ring system:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/030907.html
how embarrasing for jupiter to have such a PUNY ring system. really…
Perhaps not surprising, though. Jupiter not only has a sharper gravity gradient than Saturn, it also has a much higher indigneous radiation environment, a greater overall impact rate due to its proximity to the Asteroid Belt, and four massive inner moons...all of these are erosive factors that Saturn lacks.
All that being said, why are Uranus' and Neptune's rings much more like those of Jupiter than Saturn? I'm thinking the answer lies in extremely energetic disturbances like whatever tipped Uranus and the capture of Triton. Both of these events would have presumably destroyed most of any pre-existing extensive ring system...and, in fact, Jupiter may have been slammed around even more, but with few visible effects in the current era due to its enormous mass.
well, with neptune… i would think an event such as the capture of triton could also create a ring system through the destruction or collision of a lesser moon. is the theory of ring creation based more upon being a left-over of creation or are they the result of later cataclysmic events?
Bunch of new raws appearing at the http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/, including the rings and Tvashtar-plume-in-shadow shots. Seems to be a bit broken at the moment, though (some thumbnails and images missing).
Edit: oops, they seem to have disappeared again - perhaps an accidental early release? I hope I'm not giving anything away if I say that some ring-moon-search images appeared to be on the ground.
Well, they're back. 23 new ring photos (plus Io).
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/index.php?page=1
I'm not seeing them
Wow, that plume is really incredible
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003501/lor_0035015240_0x630_sci_2.jpg
Hmmm. I'm not sure why--they are still visible for me starting with [2007-02-24, 13:30:03 UTC] at decreasing at ten minute intervals down to [2007-02-24, 09:50:03 UTC]. The rings are clearly visible.
I'm not seeing them either. Maybe some cacheing issue somewhere. A direct link jaredGalen posted shows the image so it's probably the index page that has issues. I noticed this even before that new images would appear and then misteriously disappear again for a while.
I'm seeing them.
Wondering if this means that they found a moon:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/view_obs.php?image=data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003462/lor_0034628523_0x630_sci_1.jpg&utc_time=2007-02-24%3Cbr%3E13:10:03%20UTC&description=Jupiter+ring+-+search+for+embedded+moons&target=JUPITER&range=6.6M%20km&exposure=4000%20msec
or this and this together!
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/view_obs.php?image=data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003461/lor_0034617723_0x630_sci_1.jpg&utc_time=2007-02-24%3Cbr%3E10:10:03%20UTC&description=Jupiter+ring+-+search+for+embedded+moons&target=JUPITER&range=6.8M%20km&exposure=4000%20msec
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/view_obs.php?image=data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003461/lor_0034618923_0x630_sci_1.jpg&utc_time=2007-02-24%3Cbr%3E10:30:03%20UTC&description=Jupiter+ring+-+search+for+embedded+moons&target=JUPITER&range=6.8M%20km&exposure=4000%20msec
There are several 4s exposures on the second page that clearly show that rock following the path of the ring.
Great animation potential.
Not perfectly lined up - but that is 3hrs 40 mins of ring obs at 50%
Doug
Nice!
Is that Adrastea or Metis?
There is one obvious object in the animation that seems to track around the rings, right at the beginning, and if I've plugged things in to the Jupiter viewer correctly I think that's Adrastea. But the shape is an illusion -- if my math is correct, Adrastea should only be a fraction of a pixel in size at New Horizons' range of 6.7 million km. I'm confused about the squiggly shapes of the various spots in these pictures. They must be background stars because they form a field that moves at a constant rate over time, but I don't know why they'd appear as squiggles in 4-second exposures rather than as parallel straight lines. It's like New Horizons is wobbling.
--Emily
I thought that was Amalthea. Size should be about right.
I don't think so. I think we're looking at a smeared point source. Check out the first two frames. There are dimmer point sources that have exactly the same shape as the brightest one. I've circled them all in red.
Maybe it was deliberately smeared across multiple pixels - possibly to prevent too much bleeding from overexposure ?
What would the point of a long exposure purposeful smearing be if you wanted to prevent overexposure? I think the smear is due to the s/c attitude drift, it's thruster controlled and the s/c is pretty light so it's tough to keep it steady. Typical exposures at Pluto will be 100 ms and this is 4 seconds so it's reasonable to suggest the spacecraft is simply not stable enough for such long exposures.
From Emily's graphs it's a pretty strong case that the bright blob is Adrastea, effectively a point source but smeared to a large "potato" shape.
That's pretty much correct, except to say that we are stable "enough"- we're happy to accept a few pixels of smear in order to get these unprecedented ring images. We maintain our pointing for these long exposures with frequent thruster firings (about once per second), which are sufficient to keep our targets within a ~4x4 pixel box in the LORRI images. Hence the squiggly stars. We are actually thrilled with how well this technique is working (we hadn't had much chance to test it before the flyby)- pretty good for a little spacecraft with no reaction wheels...
John.
John,
Just to let you know that I "premiered" some of the NH images at a talk I gave here in Kendal last night for the UK's "National Science and Engineering Week". The talk at Kendal Library was attended by 30 or so people (not bad for a windy, rainy Lake District night!) and they were all thrilled to be able to see the latest images of Io and Jupiter's rings. The pictures of Tvashtar's incredible plume made a big impression - I showed the raw B&W ones and sneaked in one of my colourised versions too ( making sure everyone knew it was "unofficial and probably horribly inaccurate"! ) and there was a lot of "wow!" reaction to them.
One thing that was brought home to me last night was how valuable these talks and events are for sharing news and images with people who might be on the wrong side of the so-called "digital divide". I think we often assume that everyone is online now, or can at least get online, but that's just not true. There were a couple of (very) low income families there last night, and the mum of one of them, who had brought her three space-mad kids along, told me they have no computers at home and can't usually afford to pay for library net access either, so were especially grateful to be able to see the latest pictures at the talk because they had no other way of seeing them.
So, anyone from the MER or NH or CASSINI missions reading this, thank you again for making your images available to us "out here" so quickly and so freely; it makes the job of space educators and Outreach speakers like myself so much easier, and really does make a difference - not just to us "space nuts" but to people out there who dip into the world of space exploration when their everyday lives allow.
* Just noticed: yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of me joining UMSF... how time flies...
TritonAntares: It is Adrastea, read the above posts. It appears large due to overexposure so the camera point spread function blurs a point source into a finite smudge and it's further elongated due to the long exposure smear. The moon is nowhere near the size suggested by the image pixels.
John: Ah yes.. forgot about the 4x4 binning mode for faint KBOs. I assume this 1x1 binning was also sort of a test to see how stable the pointing remains? It does appear to me the streaks are longer than 4 pixels, but nothing major.
Yes, this mode (we call it "Relative Control Mode") was designed for our 4x4 binned "OpNav" images. But we use RCM with 1x1 binned images on the rings because (a) sometimes we get lucky with the smear and can actually get the benefit of the full resolution, or most of it, and ( b ) we get more dynamic range in 1x1 mode- 4x4 mode images saturate at lower brightness levels.
John.
Still waiting on seeing (TRUE) color images of Jupiter by NH...
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