New Horizons: Near Encounter Phase Options

[elakdawalla]

The plans for the Near Encounter Phase of the New Horizons mission have been set in stone since 2009. This week the mission has posted a Playbook that describes all the data that is going to be returned from the Near Encounter Phase -- not only the timing and geometry, but also when it is going to be played back. I also posted an article today about the data that will be played back during the couple of weeks surrounding closest approach. Some of the things I learned while writing that article that are of interest to this forum:

- Not a lot of data is being returned right away (in fact, only 1% gets returned within a week of the flyby).
- After July 20, there will be a long dry spell of no images being returned until the browse data set starts coming down on September 16.
- There will not be much scope for image processing on the data that is being returned near the flyby. There are one or two pairs of images that you can use to make stereo; there are two mosaics; there is one MVIC image for which there is LORRI data returned near enough in time to do colorization.

So it's going to be awesome, but we're also going to have to be patient!

Here is my simulation, using Voyager data, of the LORRI data set that we can expect to have on the ground as of July 20.