KBO encounters Options

[Floyd]

Roby72
New design of the New Horizons webpage:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
looking cool !

The image is by Roman Tkachenko--artist extraordinaire. His image of Pluto hangs in my home office. Thank you Roman all you give to the space community!!

[pioneer]

With less than a month until New Horizon's rendezvous, is the target still just a pixel wide in LORRI images?

[fredk]

From S&T:

Because Ultima is small — probably just 25 km (16 miles) or so in diameter — it will remain just a point of light to New Horizons until about 2 days before the close flyby.

[punkboi]

Submit your name and greeting to be transmitted to the New Horizons spacecraft before its flyby of Ultima Thule on New Year's Day!

Deadline is December 21

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Send-Greetings/

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Guest_Steve5304_*]

too small to resolve until the last minute.

The object is also very dark to begin with.

[dtolman]

According to the schedule that was posted on the Planetary Society site, they will have 5-6 or so planned images available around the encounter - Failsafe 1, Failsafe 2, "NYT 1", "NYT 2", and possibly a "NYT 3".

If the US government is in partial shutdown during the encounter, how will that effect the release of publicity images? Will the NASA TV feed still run? The official website/twitter? Can Mr Stern post pictures via his own accounts, if NASA can not?

[Alan Stern]

According to the schedule that was posted on the Planetary Society site, they will have 5-6 or so planned images available around the encounter - Failsafe 1, Failsafe 2, "NYT 1", "NYT 2", and possibly a "NYT 3".

If the US government is in partial shutdown during the encounter, how will that effect the release of publicity images? Will the NASA TV feed still run? The official website/twitter? Can Mr Stern post pictures via his own accounts, if NASA can not?

Zilch effect, other than no NASA TV, but we'll just go to FB Live and other outlets.

[dtolman]

Zilch effect, other than no NASA TV, but we'll just go to FB Live and other outlets.

Awesome! Will be watching on FB Live then - best of luck to you and your team!!!

[Floyd]

I assume FB is Facebook? Do we just go to Facebook and type in New Horizons? Sorry to be slightly clueless on these things. Is live stream something different?

[Explorer1]

Perhaps here? https://www.facebook.com/new.horizons1/

I'm sure Alan will let us know when the time comes (or perhaps the shutdown will end, whichever comes first!)

[Alan Stern]

Best place is http://pluto.jhuapl.edu - we'll update the page with links on where to watch. APL will also get a news release out midweek with the main links . . .

[Guest_avisolo_*]

Best place is http://pluto.jhuapl.edu - we'll update the page with links on where to watch. APL will also get a news release out midweek with the main links . . .

Thanks Alan, our fingers are crossed and hopes are high, keep up the good work!

[stevesliva]

Owing to our remaining expected fuel supply we will have to search for small targets, which are more numerous. Calcs show this is most likely to be a flyby of a pristine comet nucleus. Such objects are about V=35 from Earth: hence undetectable, even with HST.

So we would have to detect it with LORRI on New Horizons itself, which can see 3-10 km targets up to about 6 months ahead of us. Feasibility calcs will be done in 2019 (preliminary calcs are pessimistic but we really haven't scoured this to a solid conclusion). We'll see if this can work-- I hope so. It would be very cool to detect and target all from New Horizons with a "target of opportunity" flyby sometime n the 2020s!

This was mentioned again in today's press conference. They're now at 44 AU and hope to keep looking for targets out to 70 AU, if I recall correctly. 10-15 years more RTG life expected.

[HSchirmer]

This was mentioned again in today's press conference. They're now at 44 AU and hope to keep looking for targets out to 70 AU, if I recall correctly. 10-15 years more RTG life expected.

To quote Yogi Berra, "Deja Vu all over again"...

Cue the past thread where half the posts assert that it is totally impossible for New Horizons to detect upcoming targets, and the OTHER half of the posts assert that New Horizons could detect new targets...

[HSchirmer]

any targets after Ultima Thule?]

They will use LORRI to look for targets.

Quick recap from prior discussions

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=158572
Apr 15 2010

Our best imager, LORRI, can resolve the size of an object from roughly 10^5 object diameters away. So for a 100 km object, for example, we have to be w/i 10^7 km just to resolved it; if you want crude shape information, cut that to 10^6 diameters, and if you want "geology," well, better come to approx 30,000 diameters or better. The point here is Crantor and other distant flybys don't yield much of use, so we have not expended effort on them.

As to our KBO search, John Spencer is leading the organizational effort to recruit search teams; Andrew Steffl is helping John. Our plan is to conduct the search in 2011 and 2012, though Scott Shepard at least has already begun.

-Alan

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=159143
Apr 28 2010

I'll chip in here. Alan was talking about science at Centaurs that we might fly past on our way to Pluto- none of those will get close enough to be resolved. For the KBO target(s) beyond Pluto, we will deliberately target to get within a few tens of thousands of kilometers or closer- from 20,000 km, for instance, we would get 500 pixels across a 50 km KBO- sufficient to do some serious geology. LORRI can get well-exposed, unsmeared, images at Pluto's distance from the sun (it was designed to do that, of course), and while illumination conditions will be more challenging further out in the Kuiper Belt, there's enough performance margin that we expect to be able to do the same there.

At Crantor's distance, a LORRI pixel is 2000 km across, much bigger than Crantor itself. So there's no hope of getting any shape information.

And to make sure no-one is still confused on this point, we will not be searching for KBOs with NH itself- huge ground-based telescopes with wide-field imagers can do that much better, even though they're stuck at 1 AU.

John

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=171004
Feb 22 2011,

Talking of KBOs, here's a heads-up that YOU can probably help us to find Kuiper Belt objects for New Horizons to fly by after Pluto, starting in a month or two. We're working with the Zooniverse folks to set up a "KBO Zoo" where you will be able to help us identify moving objects (i.e. potential KBOs) in the Milky Way star fields that we'll be imaging with the Subaru, Magellan, and Canada-France-Hawaii telescopes this summer. Details once the site is up and running.

John