New Horizons: Pre-launch, launch and main cruise, Pluto and the Kuiper belt Options

[helvick]

Wonder where SD got that.

Err, pure unfounded speculation. Or if we're being kind some slightly misinformed guesswork. This is Slashdot we're talking about after all.

[mike]

Indeed, Slashdot is just a geekier version of Fark with longer descriptions for the articles.. I wouldn't trust 'the Slashdot part' of Slashdot (comments and article descriptions) to be accurate about anything, personally.

[Jeff7]

Article of the Day at The Free Dictionary is about New Horizons.

[Decepticon]

Has the Jupiter flyby Closest approach numbers been released?

I still had my fingers crossed for a Galilean Moon Photo-shoot.
Knowing the distance could give us a idea of what kind of resolution we would get of the moons.

[ugordan]

Has the Jupiter flyby Closest approach numbers been released?

I still had my fingers crossed for a Galilean Moon Photo-shoot.
Knowing the distance could give us a idea of what kind of resolution we would get of the moons.

Hew Horizons website has this to say:
"Jupiter Encounter: Closest approach scheduled to occur between Feb. 25- March 2, 2007. Moving about 47,000 miles per hour (about 21 kilometers per second), New Horizons would fly 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, coming within 31.7-32.4 Jupiter radii of the large planet."

Note that the while the RALPH camera has a red and blue filter, it has no green filter so don't hold your breath for "true" color Jupiter images.
RALPH also appears to have a poorer resolution, somewhere along the lines of 3 times the Cassini wide angle camera resolution. That would be enough to image Jupiter at a fairly good resolution, but the moons would turn up being pretty much specks of light.
LORRI on the other hand has a resolution somewhat better than Cassini narrow angle and combined with the 3-4 times closer flyby distance would actually provide some decent long distance shots of the moons. The imager, however, is panchromatic so no color here, guys...

I guess it's up to Juno for some decent true color imagery of Jupiter and some of the moons

[tedstryk]

Hew Horizons website has this to say:
"Jupiter Encounter: Closest approach scheduled to occur between Feb. 25- March 2, 2007. Moving about 47,000 miles per hour (about 21 kilometers per second), New Horizons would fly 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, coming within 31.7-32.4 Jupiter radii of the large planet."

Note that the while the RALPH camera has a red and blue filter, it has no green filter so don't hold your breath for "true" color Jupiter images. 
RALPH also appears to have a poorer resolution, somewhere along the lines of 3 times the Cassini wide angle camera resolution. That would be enough to image Jupiter at a fairly good resolution, but the moons would turn up being pretty much specks of light.
LORRI on the other hand has a resolution somewhat better than Cassini narrow angle and combined with the 3-4 times closer flyby distance would actually provide some decent long distance shots of the moons. The imager, however, is panchromatic so no color here, guys...

I guess it's up to Juno for some decent true color imagery of Jupiter and some of the moons 

I don't think that in the case of Jupiter this is a really big deal. Looking at Pioneer imagery, Red-Blue does pretty well here. Also, we have a great inventory of true color data from the ground, in addition to Galileo and Cassini, that can be used for adjustments. At any rate, for places I will never see close-up, I wouldn't mind just color-shifting and using IR-R-B color.

[Decepticon]

New Horizons would fly 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, coming within 31.7-32.4 Jupiter radii of the large planet."

That puts it just outside Callisto orbit?
Did I figure that out right?

[ugordan]

That puts it just outside Callisto orbit?
Did I figure that out right?

Yep, Callisto orbits at a distance of about 26 Jupiter radii. The sooner the spacecraft launches in the launch window, the closer it will get to Jupiter and proportionally faster to Pluto.

[Rob Pinnegar]

I wonder if New Horizons will happen to pass close to any of the outer-eccentric moons of Jupiter, as Cassini did with Himalia? There are something like fifty of those things known now.

Of course, those fifty objects are spread out over a region extending out to something like twenty-five million kilometres from Jupiter, which kind of negates the advantage of there being many of them. Still, it wouldn't be surprising if NH gets within a couple million kilometres of at least one of them. Even if it's a "one-pixel" flyby, something useful might come of it.

I guess we'll find out after launch, when the flight path is finalized.

[Decepticon]

That's why I'm in for as much bonus untargeted flybys as possible.

Galileo & Near did not disappoint.

[JRehling]

Yep, Callisto orbits at a distance of about 26 Jupiter radii. The sooner the spacecraft launches in the launch window, the closer it will get to Jupiter and proportionally faster to  Pluto.

Of course, this means that NH may fly within 6 or so Jr of Callisto, if the timing is right -- I hope it is! Ganymede could also be favorable positioned. For Io and Europa, the margin of difference is less.

I doubt if an opportunistic Callisto flyby is worth tweaking any mission constraints over, although with such a long lag between Jupiter and Pluto flybys, I would guess that it would be possible in principle to time the Jupiter encounter as desired, then tweak Pluto arrival quite easily in the years to come. But that propellant budget could buy us a KBO or not post-Pluto, and it would end up being a poor tradeoff if a KBO were missed so that a so-so Callisto image sequence could be obtained!

[ugordan]

I doubt if an opportunistic Callisto flyby is worth tweaking any mission constraints over, although with such a long lag between Jupiter and Pluto flybys, I would guess that it would be possible in principle to time the Jupiter encounter as desired, then tweak Pluto arrival quite easily in the years to come. But that propellant budget could buy us a KBO or not post-Pluto, and it would end up being a poor tradeoff if a KBO were missed so that a so-so Callisto image sequence could be obtained!

I don't think timing a Callisto nontargeted flyby would be much of an issue at all. Callisto's orbital period is 16 days and the arrangement between Jupiter and Pluto varies slowly on a timescale of +/- 8 days (which is enough to optimize for a closest approach to Callisto for the worst case scenario). The only difference would be in the actual Jupiter C/A, that would only be changed by I guess a few tens of thousands of km yet in return it would bring Callisto at an optimal point in its orbit to cut down C/A distance from millions to a few hundred thousand km.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

At the special meeting on Jupiter science from New Horizons at the 2003 DPS conference, it was made pretty clear that the most interesting new science from NH at Jupiter will probably involve, not photos of the Galilean moons, but the best near-IR spectra yet of their surface composition -- good enough in Europa's case to perhaps allow definitive identification of just what its major non-ice components are. (The RALPH near-IR spectrometer has much higher spectral resolution than Galileo's, and it will come far closer to the moons than Cassini did.)

[djellison]

Lots of images from the press day
http://www.launchphotography.com/NewHorizonsProcessing.html

Doug

[RNeuhaus]

Lots of images from the press day
http://www.launchphotography.com/NewHorizonsProcessing.html

Doug

Very nice pictures. The inquietud I have is that the probe is totally covered by a gold sheed except to the nuclear stick which looks somewhat worn with lots of scars.

Rodolfo