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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Feb 7 2006, 01:37 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1276 Joined: 25-November 04 Member No.: 114 |
QUOTE there is no need to image any of the other moons, just focus on Io Funny you miss spelled Europa Io |
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Feb 7 2006, 03:38 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 3-December 04 From: Boulder, Colorado, USA Member No.: 117 |
Maybe you folks can help us...
We're now starting to lay out the timeline for the Jupiter encounter, but what we haven't done so far is look for "Kodak moments" as the Cassini imaging folks call them- times when we have scenic alignments or unusual geometries that call for a picture that's motivated by beauty more than science. Anyone want to help us find these moments? Mark Showalter has now updated his New Horizons ephemeris tools to include the actual spacecraft trajectory through the Jupiter system. So you can download a table of satellite positions as seen from the spacecraft, and see views from the spacecraft of any body in the system at any time. It's probably most efficient to use the "Jupiter Ephemeris Generator" tool to create a table first and use that to find possible interesting alignments (e.g. times when the RA and Dec offsets of two satellites are similar), and then use the "Jupiter Viewer" to check out the view from the spacecraft at that time. The field of view of LORRI, our greyscale telephoto camera, is 5 x 5 milliradians, or 1044 arcseconds (parameters for all instruments are here). Make sure that you are using the "Official Post-Launch" trajectory option, which is the default. If you find a specific time when you think we should press the shutter, let us know! No guarantees that we'll be able to do so, as there are numerous conflicts and constraints, but we'll give it a try. LORRI images don't take a lot of resources so we can probably spare a few for scenic purposes. MVIC color images are more "expensive", and are likely to have partial saturation except at high phase angles, so we're less likely to use MVIC for this purpose. Thanks! John. |
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