New Horizons Pluto System Final Approach, 28 Jun-13 Jul 15 Options

[FOV]

While waiting for good news re NH s/c recovery from anomaly, I stacked a couple more images from July 3. Heavy hand with wavelet processing this time. Not as aesthetically pleasing as my previous post (for me). It is difficult to know if one is wringing out more real detail, or just introducing artifacts. Fine line.

[neo56]

I updated my "Plutonian day" animation with the last LORRI pictures.

[ZLD]

Heres a morph from the late June 29 series 4 data to the July 1 series 1 data. 29 hours, 1hr/s edit: 2hr/s - didn't realize gyfcat had sped this up.


(click to animate:gyfcat)
(edit: with gyfcat, you can drag the lower right corner to resize the animation)

I think, if I may infer a bit on these still early images, it seems quite likely something active is going on at the south pole. Either sublimation or clouds, something along those lines. This stays in line with what I've seen in previous morphs (some that I haven't posted) and may be an explanation for why there seems to be something hanging over the pole on the limb usually.

And for transparency sake, below is the dot cloud for one of the images, for anyone interested in how this was put together.



I always want to avoid as many artifacts in these as possible because morphing can introduce a lot. So I stick to the context grids and then insert the images after, with the same dot clouds. For the Pluto morphs, I never try to sync any features directly.

[Gavin Eadie]

Canberra DSN43 stopped receiving the NH downlink about fifteen minutes ago (12:40 EDT). Let's hope New Horizons is rotating back to point instruments at Pluto.

[ZLD]

Canberra DSN43 stopped receiving the NH downlink about fifteen minutes ago (12:40 EDT). Let's hope New Horizons is rotating back to point instruments at Pluto.

There's absolutely no reason for drama in regards to NH at this time. Alan Stern has confirmed that everything appears fine. The Earth probably rotated away from contact with NH and will reinitiate contact when the next site is available.

[pitcapuozzo]

Canberra DSN43 stopped receiving the NH downlink about fifteen minutes ago (12:40 EDT). Let's hope New Horizons is rotating back to point instruments at Pluto.

It looks like it's uploading commands currently, if I'm not mistaken.

[alk3997]

Canberra DSN43 stopped receiving the NH downlink about fifteen minutes ago (12:40 EDT). Let's hope New Horizons is rotating back to point instruments at Pluto.

As ZLD pointed out, the Earth is rotating so NH will come within view of the three different DSN stations during different parts of the day.

Also remember that almost 9 hours round-trip time. If the loss of communications occurred 24 hours ago, that means only two round-trip communications sessions could have been done by now.

Imagine trying to diagnose a computer problem if you had to wait 9 hours for a response to each diagnostic test you asked the computer to perform. While I'm not saying this is a computer problem, the time lag has the same effect no matter which system this turns out to be caused by. This isn't easy troubleshooting and if the wrong engineering data is requested from the spacecraft, then that's another 9 hours of wasted time before you can correct it. At 1kbps, there is only limited data that the NH spacecraft can send at any time.

So, drawing any conclusions from when a DSN stations starts or stops transmitting is not going to yield any useful information.

Patience is really a virtue when dealing with very long communications times.

Andy

[nprev]

Let's please not overanalyze DSN activity here. There really is no way to discern precisely what the spacecraft is doing--or not doing--based on Eyes data.

We're all obviously very interested and concerned, but it's time to settle down.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Here is a stack of three images from 2015-07-03 04:45. The images at left are enlarged by a factor of 4. The same images are shown at right together with a lat/lon grid. I processed Pluto and Charon separately.



Pluto is showing an increasing amount of details but the resolution is insufficient to show the nature of the dark and bright markings.

[PDP8E]

Here is the the July 3, 2015 image of Pluto and Charon (3x, stacked, and lightly deconvolved)
,

[Aldebaran]

Let's please not overanalyze DSN activity here. There really is no way to discern precisely what the spacecraft is doing--or not doing--based on Eyes data.

We're all obviously very interested and concerned, but it's time to settle down.

Agreed. Suffice it to say that those knuckles must be getting whiter at this stage.

We'll find out all the details at the appropriate time. In the meantime, Alan and his team have more pressing priorities.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This is an updated map of Pluto based on the June 29, July 1 and July 3 images. The map is still very crude even though it's much better than the one I posted 8 days ago - this one shows far more details.



Longitude 0 is at the left edge. One difference from the previous map is that here I used a Minnaert function to correct for the varying solar illumination across Pluto's disc instead of simply post processing things in Photoshop. I used the 'Triton value' 0.82 for the Minnaert k parameter.

And here is an updated rotation movie based on the new map. I used dark gray instead of black for the areas in the south that haven't been imaged. It's interesting to compare this movie to the recently released official rotation movie. For obvious reasons I can't process/reproject things quite as accurately as the NH team; on the other hand this movie is probably based on slightly more recent data (I don't think the official movie includes the July 3 data).

[nprev]

Latest press release. Science ops will resume 7 Jul.

[Explorer1]

Oh, those pesky glitches! A 'timing flaw" in more ways than one!

[ZLD]

July 3, 2015 images

--------------------
Pluto
image stack: 5
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(click to animate)

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Charon
image stack: 5
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Charon
image stack: 3
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-Pluto - The black areas may be mesas. I've consistently seen them appear as if they may be slightly uplifted. The morph I posted earlier suggests this as well.

-Charon - I have no idea what to say about the square. It appears at pretty much every level with little processing.

-Hydra - Very limited pixels. Appearance is definitely not certain here. The size is baffling to me. It is much larger than it should be and since it is smooth, may have a fair bit of noise that affected the outcome. Hydra is very dim and getting anything out of 10-20 pixels it contains is a challenge. Probably go ahead and discount this one though.

-Nix - Only appeared in two images and pixel density was horrible. I was able to resolve... something, but nothing I would feel confident in saying was anything. I will say that it did seem to possibly correlate to some degree to the previous Nix I posted.


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Edit
--------------------
Below are the three images for Hydra I used. These are modified straight from the JPGs on the NH Lorri site. Gamma has been pushed to 4.5 with a compression (expansion) of -15. No other processing has been performed at this stage.


I'd like to see someone else's take on this. Its probably just a lack of pixel density and/or noise getting dragged into the processing. Or Hydra could be rotating really quickly. I don't think it is probably several hundred km across. Estimates place it under 100km I think but this (probably shoddy) result I posted above would put it near triple that.