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_* |
Mar 30 2006, 02:49 AM
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Guests |
While the Europa Focus Group meeting suggested that New Horizons' near-IR spectra of Europa -- contrary to my fond hopes -- probably will not reveal any new substances mixed with Europa's ice, its long-range LORRI photography will try to directly display one fascinating new type of Europan terrain feature only recently revealed by Paul Schenk's stereo analysis of Galileo's photos.
These are "crop circles" -- gigantic structures that look like huge, gentle semicircular moats in Europa's surface, hundreds of km wide and dozens of km thick, which are too gentle to be directly revealed by surface shadows in any single images so far, and which (given our limited views of them so far) may actually be just parts of complete, huge ring-like structures. No one knows whether they're crater remnants, diapirs, or some other kind of structure in Europa's ice -- but NH will photograph Europa's terminator (something Galileo didn't do too much of) to try to get a clearer look at them. (These were among the very few genuinely new scientific revelations at the meeting.) |
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Mar 30 2006, 04:41 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 599 Joined: 26-August 05 Member No.: 476 |
These are "crop circles" -- gigantic structures that look like huge, gentle semicircular moats in Europa's surface, hundreds of km wide and dozens of km thick, ... Tried google and got Schenk's paper - http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2005/pdf/2081.pdf but the other links were just about as expected for a search on "cr*p c*rcles". |
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