New Horizons late cruise, 500 Millions kms - ~200 million kms Options

[jmknapp]

Nice overview of the mission (77 minute video) at this press conference back in November--see the link on this page under "Press Conferences from DPS 46, Tucson, Arizona, 9-14 November 2014":

Seminar for Science Writers: The New Horizons Encounter with Pluto in 2015
http://aas.org/media-press/archived-aas-pr...erence-webcasts

That page will also eventually have webcasts of press conferences of the current AAS conference in Seattle.

[Jaro_in_Montreal]

Question please:
Where may one find diagrams of the planned NH Pluto survey coverage at different resolutions ? (ditto for the moons)
Thank you.

[Decepticon]

Emily did this recently. Very insightful.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...ns-science.html

[Jaro_in_Montreal]

Thanks.
The tables are good, but I was looking for a diagram.
Presumably the regional hi-rez imaging will not cover the entire hemisphere ?

http://blogs.nasa.gov/mission-ames/wp-cont...07/Best_Res.png

[MahFL]

New Horizons is now 212778450 kilometers away from Pluto, from yaohua website.

http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.pl

[Greg Hullender]

I have worried because our knowledge of Pluto's position is imprecise. Some long-ago posts had mentioned that NH would expect to waste some pictures (i.e. take pics of empty space) in order to be sure it really got all of Pluto. That has bothered me for several years now (I'm greedy), so my favorite tidbit from the update on the JHUAPL site was this:

“We need to refine our knowledge of where Pluto will be when New Horizons flies past it,” said Mark Holdridge, the New Horizons encounter mission manager from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “The flyby timing also has to be exact, because the computer commands that will orient the spacecraft and point the science instruments are based on precisely knowing the time we pass Pluto – which these images will help us determine.”

Spacecraft operators also track New Horizons using radio signals from NASA’s Deep Space Network. But the “optical navigation” campaign that begins this month marks the first time pictures from New Horizons will be used to help pinpoint Pluto’s location.

[MahFL]

Less than 200 million km to go.

New Horizons is now 199944087 kilometers away from Pluto.

http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.pl

[Alan Stern]

UMSFers-- New Horizons Reddit AMA tomorrow!

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[infocat13]

UMSFers-- New Horizons Reddit AMA tomorrow!

I am in class at that hour so my question would be, after course correction maneuvers for a post Pluto encounter where will New Horizons and its third stage motor be hundreds of thousands of years or more from now?

[ngunn]

That's odd. We seem to be missing a few posts from this thread including Explorer1's useful link posted at 9:10 pm yesterday, 3rd Feb.

EDIT: This works if you go to 'members posts' for Explorer 1 and click on the link. (For some reason this copy of it doesn't.)
New link to Alan's latest status here:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Per...tive_01_23_2015

[Astro0]

ADMIN: Now that the first Lorri OpNav image is in, several posts moved to the new NH: Approach Phase thread.

[Aldebaran]

Another milestone coming up. 1 AU from Pluto tomorrow.

A hypothetical observer on New Horizons would see many bright stars in the general direction of Pluto, but Pluto itself is still a mere 7th magnitude object - barely discernable but brightening by -0.02 magnitude every day at this stage.