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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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jan 24 2006, 02:11 AM
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Guests |
Judging from the NH Jupiter encounter planning meeting I attended back at the 2003 DPS meeting, the most interesting piece of new information that comes out of the NH Jupiter flyby may be its near-IR spectra of the surface composition of the Galilean moons -- especially Europa. Its spectrometer has much higher spectral resolution than Galileo's and will be considerably closer to the Galilean moons that Cassini's, implying that it may be able to nail down whether that stuff mixed with Europa's ice is Mg sulfate or sulfuric acid.
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