Jupiter from Feb. 10:



EDIT: Updated mosaic

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

Cassini also did that. I suppose there must be a good reason for increasing data volume by 3 times but one escapes me right now.

BTW, is that Red Junior on the eastern limb?

Looking for sattelites? rings?

Image artifact?

EDITED:
Original images:
Left
Right

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.

Red Jr. is the one a little to the west of the limb.

I'm not going to mess around with the ephemeris of all of the outer satellites and correlate the data with NH's trajectory, but a key point here is that Himalia and Elara are much bigger than most of the rocks out there, and they are #1 (by far) and #2 in size in that set. Leda, for example, is only 10 km in diameter, so NH wouldn't have much chance to get a decent image unless it virtually ran into Leda.

Himalia will be about 5 pixels across in the best image; Elara will be at best 3. Cassini's view of Himalia was eerily similar in resolution, also reported as 27 km.pixel. If you look at that image, you may be a little less excited about the NH opportunity, although the repeated observations will be valuable for determining the gross shape of "Jupiter VI", as Himalia was long known.

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 . . . .

As Exploitcorporations pointed out, Red jr. is to the lower left of the feature you were thinking of. That feature, in the STrB, can be seen in Christopher Go's astrophotography of Jupiter - http://www.christone.net/astro/jupiter/index.htm . See the images from Feb. 13 and the feature just to the lower right.

My relatively naive assumption was that there isn't much else to be looking at a week after closest approach, when the sun is behind Jupiter and most of the moons. Are the earlier observations an investment in making the last ones more valuable?