Is that expected to be today or next week that we get a few images? NH has been talking to the DSN already for a while now.

Alan told me in July that Friday releases will include everything downlinked up until close of business on Tuesday. So even if New Horizons is currently downlinking images, we won't see raw releases for another week. Patience! I'm sure we'll see some great captioned releases in the coming days. Keep in mind Monday is a U.S. holiday and while I've never known regular business hours to constrain Alan's work I suspect the first releases will need HQ approval.

Latest, as expected:



http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-hor...-downlink-phase

And yes, hopefully we'll see a few images before that.

Maybe rename "Tombaugh Regio" to "Mare Tombaugh"? Just sayin.....

No, not a good idea. 'Mare' means sea. It is used on the Moon for purely historical reasons*, and on Titan where there are real seas. Regio just means region, it's a more general name but far more appropriate.

Phil

* Leonardo da Vinci thought the bright areas were seas, bright because each wave reflected a flash of sunlight. Galileo took issue with this, after seeing the surface through a telescope. He said, if any parts of the Moon are seas they would have to be the dark areas, because the bright areas are mountainous. He didn't say they WERE seas, but the name took hold after that.

We may be looking at a sea covered by a layer of ice, or convection cells of a plastic flow icy (Nitrogen? Carbon Monoxide?) layer (or both). There seem to be erosive features around the edges, and it sits lower than surrounding terrain. Time will tell if it becomes determined that it is liquid or just some sort of plastic flow, but calling it a "mare" may not be so far fetched.

While it's not a very creative name, and it's not historically been used in astronomy, the Latin for "glacier" is "glaciarium". So if one wanted to be more precise as to what sort of "regio" it is... But Mark's point is a fair one, too.



... here's to hoping! Can't wait to see some closeups on the dark material between the Sputnik "cells", and of the glacial terminii. Oooh, and higher resolution spectral data to map surface features with spectra!

NH has been talking to the DSN for a couple of hours now, so perhaps the (still historic!) image downlink has started.

http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

(I haven't read anything about when exactly the image downlink is supposed to start - not that it should matter much for us in terms of release time, anyway)

It starts today, images will be posted each Friday.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-hor...-downlink-phase

Yes, I just posted that link above. I just don't know the hour the image downlink is supposed to start, or did start.

Now let's see if the NH team can sit on the images and not release them -- because they're so darned cool and they can't resist -- until the Friday release date.

That's one thing I love about the NH team. They are well and truly enthused by their mission and its discoveries, and just can't wait to share their data products with all of us. I'll bet some of the really, really interesting and striking images will be released early. I'm not counting on it, but it would be in character.

-the other Doug

The suspense is terrible; I hope it lasts.
I don't know who's been noticing, but for anyone who hasn't, they've been publishing new LORRI images in SOC, at least as recently as the middle of August. Not the particularly recent, exciting ones, but still new to us. If I weren't on a phone, I'd provide links, but you can see some at the bottom of the first page (the darker ones) and more on the next page. If I recall correctly, the metadata files indicate they were published August 11 and August 14, assuming year/day_of_year is how those archive dates are meant to be interpreted.

Edit: I guess I can post links fine on a phone. Here's one of them: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounte...sure=800%20msec
Metadata file for that one says 2015/226

According to now deleted tweet from @michael_w_busch data release will be on Friday, as expected, press releases on Thursday. So we have to wait two more days ):

The Christian Science Monitor :
"From the imagery I saw coming down over the weekend, it's really, really spectacular stuff," says Dr. Stern,

I haven't seen anything else on a supposed press release tomorrow; so it'll be interesting to see if we actually get anything.

Before that, I'd like to draw some attention to a part of northwestern Sputnik:



There is some delicate branching going on with the dark line there.

The mountain/big rocky structure in the upper half looks like it might have experienced some serious erosion. HSchirmer mentioned 67P earlier, and there is sort of something 67P-esque about the way it appears to be fractured.



Judging by NASA's Eyes (above), it looks like the branching will not be imaged at the highest resolution (although the continuation of the line it branches off probably will be). The rocky structure should, however, stand a good chance of having at least been imaged partially at highest resolution. The entire area will apparently be imaged by MVIC at a resolution of 320 m/px.