New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase |
New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase |
Mar 11 2015, 01:49 AM
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
The plans for the Near Encounter Phase of the New Horizons mission have been set in stone since 2009. This week the mission has posted a Playbook that describes all the data that is going to be returned from the Near Encounter Phase -- not only the timing and geometry, but also when it is going to be played back. I also posted an article today about the data that will be played back during the couple of weeks surrounding closest approach. Some of the things I learned while writing that article that are of interest to this forum:
- Not a lot of data is being returned right away (in fact, only 1% gets returned within a week of the flyby). - After July 20, there will be a long dry spell of no images being returned until the browse data set starts coming down on September 16. - There will not be much scope for image processing on the data that is being returned near the flyby. There are one or two pairs of images that you can use to make stereo; there are two mosaics; there is one MVIC image for which there is LORRI data returned near enough in time to do colorization. So it's going to be awesome, but we're also going to have to be patient! Here is my simulation, using Voyager data, of the LORRI data set that we can expect to have on the ground as of July 20. -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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Jul 13 2015, 09:18 PM
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IMG to PNG GOD Group: Moderator Posts: 2251 Joined: 19-February 04 From: Near fire and ice Member No.: 38 |
Charon looks somewhat similar to Uranus' moons, at least at this resolution. The chasm seems comparable to features seen on Ariel and Titania.
Just looked at the latest Charon image again and that "crater" at 6-7 O'Clock appears to me to have a plume of darker material in the direction of the limb I can't see anything plume-like anywhere. Meanwhile, on Pluto in the latest image (the one obtained at a distance of 2.5 million km), some of the terrain in the lower half of the image and left of center (at approximately 7 o'clock where there are alternating patches of bright and darker terrain) is starting to remind me a bit of the weird looking terrain seen in hi-res images of Mars' polar regions ("Swiss cheese features") where sublimation is a significant process. The only problem is that the Martian features aren't big and wouldn't even be close to visibility at the resolution of the most recent NH Pluto image. |
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