Pluto Surface Observations 3: NH Post-Encounter Phase, 1 Feb 2016- TBD Options

[john_s]

Emily's new "What's Up in the Solar System" blog has some updates from Kim Ennico and myself. Bottom line: downlink will probably complete in late October or early November. Because downlink was prioritized, most of the highest-priority stuff is already on the ground.

John

[Alan Stern]

I haven't caught a recent update on the progress of the download of the encounter data. Has it been completed?

The encounter download still has a ways to go. We estimate finishing about 1 November, the main uncertainty in an exact date is DSN scheduling. Currently the downlink is dominated by instrument calibration data that will improve our ability to reduce the data already on the ground. About 15% of the Pluto system data, primarily data from Ralph and LORRI, still remain to be sent after that.

[Herobrine]

After acknowledging that the last thing I'd played with could probably have been completed many hundreds of hours faster if I'd bothered to work with SPICE kernels, I decided to write some handling of SPICE kernel data into my coding environment and play around with it. I implemented the Owen & O'Connell Distortion Model for LORRI, described in the instrument kernel so I can go back and forth between pixel coordinates and camera frame vectors and played around with seeing what that and the other SPICE kernels allowed me to do. I tried reproducing that spirally approach animation without any manual work and I got a half decent result. The one I created by spending hundreds of hours aligning stuff by hand wasn't nearly as shaky, so perhaps it wasn't all time wasted.
I don't know what exactly I'll do, now that I have J2000 position and orientation data for New Horizons, LORRI, Pluto, and Charon at the time of each LORRI observation, but here's something I've been working on using it.
I've used the data and the camera model to orient and roughly align the LORRI frames (and their pixels) in J2000 on Pluto, sampled based on distance, such that Pluto shows up the same size in each frame, and after a bunch of manual combining and fine-tuning of image position, here's a little animation of a full rotation of Pluto, as seen by LORRI, played at 150,000 times actual speed:

It uses 31 sets of LORRI observations (each frame combines multiple LORRI frames from the same...observation set or whatever you call it; the last 5 frames are actually mosaics), whittled down from 42 since some were very close in time to others. The original size of this animation had Pluto 1024 pixels in diameter, but I've shrunk it to less than 200 to bring the file size under what the forum can take. It looks better smaller anyway, because the difference in quality from the earliest to the latest frame isn't quite as visible. If it looks like Pluto wanders a little for 1/3 of this, it's because I slowly shifted the frames over in this version to make the last frame and first frame line up better (the last frame was taken from very close to Pluto and the change in perspective between that and the first frame is significant).

[Explorer1]

Great work Herobrine, and fascinating! Could the same be done with Charon?

We can almost extrapolate from the hemisphere we've seen to the far side hemisphere. The dark equatorial regions are pretty much the same, and that prominent crater on the far side might be a mini-version of SP? Hard to tell since its b/w.
It will certainly be a long time before any artistic speculation can be verified, though I'm willing to wait.

[atomoid]

very cool indeed! reminds me of recent NYT spinnable globes page it even includes a version of Charon with starch wreck names! i didn't see linked on these pages, so there it is..

[Roman Tkachenko]

This processed image reveals new details on Sputnik Planum.
The scattering map https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/intricat...-sputnik-planum inspired me some time ago to create something similar.


UPD: Animation

[tedstryk]

Excellent work!

[Roman Tkachenko]

A synthetic perspective view of Pluto

[Roman Tkachenko]

New combined image reveals mysterious topography beyond Pluto's terminator.

[Explorer1]

Amazing work Roman!

A pity Charon's night side image is such low resolution so we can't really do the same thing: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-night-side
Is that blob on the 4:00 position of the disc even real? Perhaps an extension of the canyon on the lit side?

[vikingmars]

New combined image reveals mysterious topography beyond Pluto's terminator.

How NICE Roman ! What a GREAT work you did !
This was the interpretation I made a while ago for our TPS members in France to enhance the astounding diversity of the geological features found on this small world (reduced format to fit the Forum limitations).
And also as a tribute to the success of this incredible mission, thanks to the NH Team
Enjoy !

[Spock1108]

Roman Congratulations! A resolution masterpiece! I love your elaboration, is much better than the NASA's official ones!

Why do not you make a version with natural colors?

[Greg Malone]

Oh man, what an excellent processed image. Thanks!

If there is, by chance, a larger version of this, perhaps you could post it, or a link to it? Perhaps a gigantic lossless version?

Very nice.

[Roman Tkachenko]

Is that blob on the 4:00 position of the disc even real? Perhaps an extension of the canyon on the lit side?

I'm not sure about this.

How NICE Roman ! What a GREAT work you did ! ohmy.gif ohmy.gif ohmy.gif

Thank you!

Why do not you make a version with natural colors?

Here is my attempt to colorize this image (https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/th...lease_small.png) in natural colors.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9BbN4IH2l...iew?usp=sharing
And here is my attempt to colorize my combined image.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9BbN4IH2l...iew?usp=sharing
Anyway, these images are not in natural colors if you ask me.....near-natural colors.

If there is, by chance, a larger version of this, perhaps you could post it, or a link to it? Perhaps a gigantic lossless version?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9BbN4IH2l...iew?usp=sharing

[Roman Tkachenko]

Another combined image.
Colorized using MVIC data.