[X] My Assistant

[Tom Tamlyn]

During the press conference recorded on January 15 (rebroadcasted on NASA TV this morning), several of the New Horizons instruments have been described as the most capable ever carried for a planetary reconnaissance. For "reconnaissance" I guess we should understand "fly-by," i.e., the instruments are more powerful than those carried by the Pioneers & Voyagers.

It would be interesting to learn how they compare with the corresponding instruments on Cassini & Galileo, with their much higher payloads.

TTT

Edit: I just heard Craig Covault from Aviation Week catch this issue, but he didn't pursue the comparison beyond Voyager & Pioneer.

This post has been edited by Tom Tamlyn: Jan 18 2006, 06:08 PM

[ljk4-1]

A What If group of questions:

Suppose that in 1980, NASA/JPL, realizing that they could not penetrate the clouds of Titan or even hope to see any surface through gaps in the clouds (and even if they could have, no doubt it would have left everyone seriously confused), had redirected Voyager 1 to flyby Pluto around 1990.

In addition to the fact that we would have long known about a few more moons of Pluto besides Charon, what do you think would have been changed/modified/ replaced on New Horizons had the Voyager 1 flyby taken place? Would Voyager 1 been up to the task at all? I remember its images were not quite as sharp as Voyager 2's.

Would NH even exist if Voyager 1 had explored Pluto?

Do you think Pluto will be all that different from Triton - besides the fact that it won't have a big blue world in the background?

[mcaplinger]

Would NH even exist if Voyager 1 had explored Pluto?

Clearly the NH payload is much more capable than Voyager's. That said, I don't think NH would have flown if Voyager 1 had visited Pluto, assuming that it had worked as well as Voyager 2 did at Neptune. We would have 1 km resolution visible color images of the illuminated faces of Pluto/Charon and probably some occultation data (I'm not sure that IRIS could have gotten anything useful.) That would have made spending the NH budget on " just another flyby" a pretty hard sell.