Yes - much like the ALH84001 story, they had it sat in archives for years before they paid it any real attention, not knowing what it actually was.

Doug

Well - look at the Viking Landers. 2000+ sols.



Doug

Crickey - this stuff needs SAVING - it's important. Perhaps TPS could be convinced to do some sort of rescue ops and go and hunt for all this old stuff. It's important.

Doug

Yup - I'm back in the artifact camp now

Doug

No really, NASA View, FITS Liberator and even the little JPG's that were on the raw DI webpage 6 months ago all have the same thing.

Doug

Realistically..... they'll look at the current spacecraft trajectory, and run forward to see what encounters are possible given the available dV and/or future flyby trajectory adjustments using Earth, and the power situation given how carefully they had to manage the spacecraft when it was out at aphelion.

It'll be a case of what can we visit with Stardust, not can we visit XXX with Stardust. Potential candidates will select themselves based on the orbital mechanics of it all.

Doug

Good luck to you as well Ben - we're counting on your for the picture's we'll put on our walls of this one

Doug

Pluto gives us 4 bodies for the price of one, that we know to be reachable, targetable, and interesting.

To even entertain the idea of targetting elsewhere is just crazy.

Doug

That freakier one was indeed nIR, G, B

Doug

Kudos to Bill Hardwood who said "I'm going to ask a question about New Horizons seing as no one else has"

Doug

Well - that's what I thought initially, given that Nitrogen is the main gas there, BUT, it's 'most' of the gas here on earth, and I was under the impression that it's mainly Oxygen and other gases, not Nitrogen that cause the earth aurora - BUT - on further reading, the red aurora on earth are indeed Nitrogen based, so one can only assume that Titan aurora would be in the same ballpark.

Doug

Who know - perhaps it is. Earth Aurora are based around Oxygen emissions irrc, whereas Titanian Aurora would be based on what I assume must be Methane?

Doug

Well - if they'll go for 'Xena'......

Doug

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&hs=iE...+in+mph&spell=1

Google is quite powerfull

Doug

I thought that - but they could have angled nozzles on the solids to put the thrust direction in such a way whereby it all cancels out, and/or use the RD180 to compensate.

If you were to roll 180 degrees, you could use the thrust of the SRB's to pitch over

Doug

nIR-G-B of the moon, again, uncalibrated so it's cheated-levels to get it something like ordinary.

I think the first line ( first few lines actually ) are a sort of barcode.

Doug

Yeah - this is uncalibrated cruise stuff - the encounter imagery is calibrated, so I'm guessing it wont have it

Doug

And umm..yeah...IR spectra.. Err..umm. yeah.

These are what you get when you open the .fit with Fits liberator.

Nice

Doug

Nothing to see 'in' this one, but it's an RGB comp during some ""ENCOUNTER VALIDATION TEST" imaging, stretched to show the 4 areas of the CCD and how different they are w.r.t. noise. I'm not sure if the final 'nested' imaging (i.e. sub-framing) during the impactor event was using just one quadrant of this, or the middle of the 4 areas.

The High and Medium res on the flyby and Medium res on the Impactor ( i.e. all 3 visible cameras) share identical patterns, so one presumes it's a noise / electronics issue that is common to all, and thus (whilst I've not actually read that this is true) they must all share the same CCD design, much like MER does, across multiple instruments.

I'm going to try...TRY..and have a look at some IR info (I'll probably start with lunar calib data) , but it may be both mine and Emily's worst nightmare - an ISIS only situation.

Doug

Jupiter - this is two images, a longer (with moons visible but Jupiter bleached out) and a shorter (moons not visible, but Jupiter in good shape) exposure combined, poor focus can be seen on the Jovain Moons. This was 2005-02-06T03:43:57.303 ish...

Using the JPL solar system sim - they are, from top to bottom, Europe, Io and Ganymede ( http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?t...fov=0.1&bfov=30 ) - Callisto is out of shot below.

Unfortunately, just taken in 'clear' filter, so no colour - I'm trying to see if any of the calib obs were done in colour - the single star ones are fairly pointless, but the cluster and planetary obs should be fun.

Doug

I'm going to put my vote in the hat marked "Imaging Artifact on one filter wheel"

Doug

I'm still waiting for the later calib images to come down

I have all the impactor imagery though

Doug

I dont think you've got that right. If you go back and read Alan's PI-Persp's, I see no mention of rolling instrument operation a-la Voyager.

Doug

And not teaching them that it's TOO small and TOO far, not TO

The real argument is one that will doubtless cause many a conference-argument for decades, personally, I think Pluto deserves it's title as it 'got there first' so to speak, and then the similar bodies out at that sort of range with that sort of composition should be refered to as Plutonian's or part of the Pluto 'class' of bodies.

Doug

Well - as they just have a bunch of .tar's on a webpage, I used FlashGet with Free Download Manager in Firefox and asked it to grab the lot

There's plenty-gig's of it, and my ISP will start FedEx'ing horses heads if I'm not carefull for the rest of this month

Doug