New Horizons: Approach Phase, OpsNav - 25 January 15 to 28 June 15 Options

[infocat13]

UMSFers-- New Horizons Reddit AMA tomorrow!

I am in class at that hour so my question would be, after course correction maneuvers for a post Pluto encounter where will New Horizons and its third stage motor be hundreds of thousands of years or more from now?

[MahFL]

The LORRI image release for today is up at :

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-A...p?page=20150204

[Gerald]

Starting from manually determined positions of Nix and Hydra

in 17 (until 2015-05-06) of the OpNav Campaign 3, LORRI 4x4, cleaned, stacked and star-background-subtracted image quintuples I've tried to simulate the positions by manually adjusting parameters of assumed circular orbits:

This simulation can be extrapolated:

After narrowing down the orbital plane I've transformed the processed LORRI images, such that objects orbiting in a circular way around the Pluto/Charon barycenter are mapped to almost constant position; phase angle as x, radius as y-axis:

Here an example of the last eight of this image sequence stacked to reduce noise:


Versions on less

and more processed images:


For small radii the method is very sensitive to the barycenter.

Nix and Hydra are apparent, Styx and Cerberus not yet evident (to me), despite this excessive processing.