[X] My Assistant

[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?

[MahFL]

The LORRI image release for today is up at :

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-A...p?page=20150204

[Phil Stooke]

Unfortunately that image is a gigantic blow-up of an original image where the planet was about one pixel across, so your result is a trifle unreliable. Wait a bit before trying to measure anything.

Phil

[Webscientist]

Ok, that's a little early I guess.

I've just represented what it might look like if it is squeezed that way and if it looks like Triton.

Here is the result:

Unfortunately that image is a gigantic blow-up of an original image where the planet was about one pixel across, so your result is a trifle unreliable. Wait a bit before trying to measure anything.

Phil

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[4throck]

Pluto's size is well known. Occultations give you a precise measurement, much better than low resolution images.
From Wikipedia you have 1184±10 km .

If you had an image where Pluto covered ~50 pixels, each pixel would be as large as the 20km error margin.
To refine the measurement you need images with the planet larger than that :-)

Smaller images will tell you very little and be dominated by individual pixel noise.