NH at Jupiter, Planning the Jupiter encounter Options

[john_s]

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.

[Bart]

On an extremely amateur basis, I did some (very) back of the envelope calculations and came up with Himalia spanning about 9.5 pixels a week after Jupiter C/A - slightly better than Cassini.

Can't wait to hear real numbers from people who actually know in a couple of weeks.

Bart