New Horizons Pluto System Final Approach, 28 Jun-13 Jul 15 Options

[Explorer1]

Still too early to tell (17 million km to go!). If these images were coming out in a newspaper, I would not be taking a magnifying glass to them and exclaiming that Pluto is made of tiny coloured dots!

Two weeks left....

[jgoldader]

Probably-stupid question, There are possibly that the Black Long feature are a metane or azote liquid lake?

Too cold, I think. Wolfram says methane's freezing point is around 90K and Pluto's colder than that. At least, it is today. But the bright and dark regions on the latest Pluto images reminded me of the bright highland and dark lowland regions (probably wrong nomenclature) on Titan. If we see something like that on Pluto, that would be very interesting indeed.

[nprev]

Daniele, I don't think that it's possible for those to be methane lakes since Pluto's atmospheric pressure is far, far lower than even that of Mars; around three micro(not milli-)bars per this NASA fact sheet.

[Decepticon]

I remember a day when triton was theorized to have lakes of methane.

Ciao!

[eliBonora]

One stack of yesterday images (full 400%)
I cannot wait to focus on these features!

[Gladstoner]

The dark features may be more akin to those visible on Triton:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA00329

[ZLD]

Well, I was hopeful that all of the June 29 images could be stacked but I think there is actually enough movement that it degraded the quality too much for my liking.


Single frame on left, blink animation on right

June 28, 2015 - 2 images


Charon is absent in one of the images and so I simply excluded it.

June 29, 2015 - 04:56 UTC - 2 images


June 29, 2015 - 05:02 UTC - 2 images



June 29, 2015 - 05:03 UTC - 1 image


Keep in mind these are all limited data stacks so noise is likely to be apparent and different features are also likely to pop in and out of visibility.

[alk3997]

I thought I would see if I could tease some information out of the dark areas using a single image of Pluto/Charon. The original is the 6/29/15 at 05:03:10 UTC 1:1 bin image released today.



No stacking on this one. The only processing was a 4x enlargement followed by contrast/brightness/midtone enhancements.

If anyone would like to speculate about clouds the wispy area near Pluto's dark band certainly could be a starting point or it could be ice. Charon's anti-dark pole almost looks like it has some relief showing.

Anyway, just an attempt to find more information from the data (that will hopefully be obsolete within a week).

When we get images this quickly from New Horizons, it very much reminds me of watching Dr. Albert Hibbs and his guests at JPL explain Voyager images as they appeared on the monitors in real time during the Saturn/Uranus/Neptune encounters.


Andy

[Explorer1]

When we get images this quickly from New Horizons, it very much reminds me of watching Dr. Albert Hibbs and his guests at JPL explain Voyager images as they appeared on the monitors in real time during the Saturn/Uranus/Neptune encounters.

Andy

Will there be anything like that during the NASA TV coverage during the week of the flyby (i.e. seeing mission control)? I've read Emily's blog post but it seems like it will be a combination of press conferences and hammering refresh on the raw images page, not that that's a bad thing....
(Speaking of which, some dedicated Hydra targeting has started: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/index.php )

[nprev]

Refer to the first post of this thread, and esp. to Emily's article about planned activities. The data rate from Pluto's distance is nowhere near as high as it is during a Jupiter encounter (1kb/sec vs. something like 38 kb/sec), so we're likely gonna see just a few images with a good deal of time between them on encounter day. Per Emily's article again, only 1% of the acquired science data will be returned then.

[Explorer1]

Yep, I know how slow it will go considering how thin the data-pipe is over these distances. Just wondering about the coverage itself, beyond the critical 'beep' on the 14, all the live reactions from MC (which I'm such a sucker for!)


Also: SOFIA's observations got some good data: http://www.sofia.usra.edu/News/news_2015/06_29_15/index.html

[ZLD]

Best I can do with the June 29 data. I think temporal blurring is subtle but likely problematic at the same time, even at this distance.

[fred_76]

Nix and Hydra the 29/06/2015 in the bin x1 images :



Close up on Pluto and Charon :



It seems there is a huge impact crater on Pluto...

Fred

[Explorer1]

We can't be seeing a crater shadow yet; NH is still at a tiny solar incidence angle until nearly closest approach; it's 'only' a dark patch (see the previous thread, with Bjorn's illustration).

[Habukaz]

The dark features may be more akin to those visible on Triton:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA00329

In those images, the dark band near Triton's equator looks a lot like the dark bands near Pluto's equator; though it appears to be somewhat brighter on Triton.

It seems there is a huge impact crater on Pluto...

In rotation videos, the shape looks wrong; too oblong.

We can't be seeing a crater shadow yet

It could though be possible to see different surface composition due to altitude - i.e. like mountains on Earth may have a white snow cover.