NH at Jupiter, Planning the Jupiter encounter |
NH at Jupiter, Planning the Jupiter encounter |
Jan 22 2006, 10:57 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 3-December 04 From: Boulder, Colorado, USA Member No.: 117 |
I think the Jupiter encounter deserves its own thread.
I've just been taking a first look at the Jupiter encounter geometry. You can do the same using Mark Showalter's excellent on-line ephemeris tools at the PDS rings node, which by good fortune happens to include a New Horizons ephemeris (calculated over a year ago) for our actual launch date, January 19th. We'll have an updated ephemeris soon, but this one's already good enough for planning. As Roby72 noted in the Star 48 thread, the satellites are (annoyingly) all on the opposite side of Jupiter at closest approach. We'll still get good views of all sides of Io because Io rotates in only 1.8 days and we'll be pretty close to Jupiter for that long. We'll get fairly good coverage on Europa too, for the same reason. But we won't get very close to Ganymede or Callisto. Luckily Io is our highest priority satellite target and Europa is next, so we'll do OK. |
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Jan 23 2006, 12:28 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 122 Joined: 26-June 04 From: Austria Member No.: 89 |
John,
yes the day before (or after), Io must be on the right side of the planet, but I think the high speed of NH makes the distance about equal than on encounter day at the other side (about 2.5 Mio km). Resolution for LORRI (bw imager) should be about 12 km, for RALPH (color) about 50km) This would be nice for plume searching and is about 5 times more resolution in case of LORRI than Cassini had at its Jupiter encounter in Dec. 2000. Robert |
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Jan 23 2006, 12:44 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
Any chance NH could image Europa well enough to see if any surface features have changed/moved since Galileo?
-------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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