FWIW, the rings pictures have disappeared for me, though there's more Io pictures than I saw yesterday. I suspect they may have been taken down. I was planning on taking my timeline today, pulling out the list of LORRI observations, and making a note of which ones had been released to the SOC site -- but I'm not sure now I want to do that, if the site's not going to be stable I know they're updating the site manually and are trying to get as much stuff out to the masses as they can while at the same time holding some stuff back until they get press releases done on their more spectacular pics. There may have been some mixup about what they wanted to do with those pics.

EDIT: Now some, but not all, of the rings pics are back. And I think there are some more rings pics from earlier in the day Feb 24 than I saw yesterday. Now I'm really confused.

--Emily

We're just messing with you, Emily

Actually, there has been a little confusion on our end about what gets posted (and maybe problems synchronizing the various sites), but we think we've got it sorted out now, so things should be more stable now (images will be added, but not subtracted) and you should be able to develop your list with confidence.

John.

Cool! In this ring image you can make out not just two rings but a third -- a small division in the outer of the two more easily distinguishable rings. Here's a bit of that image enhanced with a large-radius unsharp mask to bring out the detail. This is one of the more stable of the images -- you can see the bright stars are smeared into rough ovals, not dumbells or other exotic shapes -- so I don't think the extra division is an artifact of the image smearing.

Click to view attachment

Nope!!!
Still not right...
I don't see any ring images now!

I guess that some of the "sorting" involved de-posting the ring images. Those of us who have them on our computers will just have to keep them super-secret until they get re-posted after they report whatever it is they've discovered. (And no, I don't have any inside knowledge about any discovery, I'm just speculating wildly.)

--Emily

Sigh, I guess the bugs aren't out of the system yet. It's some sort of file-synching problem- we're working on it. I'm sure we'll have this all debugged by the time we get to Pluto...

John.

OK, now some of the rings pictures are back. You ARE messing with me, John.

--Emily

I guess there aren't a lot of UV spectroscopists on the board, but a couple of days ago the New Horizons team posted some Alice data showing gas phase UV spectra from Io, the Io plasma torus, and Jupiter. There’s a lot of structure in the spectra, and many of the same electronic transitions in the Io atmosphere also show up in the torus. Alan must be thrilled.

Also, the team just posted new views of Red Junior. LORRI comes through again.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/index.php


EDIT: Closer examination of the spectra reveals some real significant changes between the molecules in Io's atmosphere and those that make it into the Plasma Torus. A number of peaks grow in, especially at 130nm, 135nm, and 148nm. Being someone that worked with a lot of solution phase experiments, I'm always surprised how much detail you can get from a gas phase spectrum. When you take away the modulating effects of the solvating liquid, all that remains is the electronic structure of the molecule to determine the transition frequency. Thus, nice sharp lines.

Attached is a poor-man's comparison of the two spectra. Note the differences.

Click to view attachment

Some new satellite images are now up:

First up is Ganymede. This view is centered near the sub-Jovian point, 6 South, 18.5 West. The prominent ray crater just above and to the left of center is named Tros. This impact is located within Phrygia Sulcus and is the southeast of the dark region named Perrine Regio. The other prominent ray crater, located at lower left, is named Cisti.
Click to view attachment

Next up is Callisto. Like the Ganymede image, this view is centered near the sub-Jovian point, 4 South, 356.2 West. This is the highest resolution view of Callisto New Horizons obtained. The central bright region of Valhalla is visible near the limb just above center. The large impact basins Lofn (left) and Heimdall (right) are visible near the limb in the south polar region. Voyager captured a similar global view of Callisto, and Galileo captured a nice view of Lofn.
Click to view attachment

That Ganymede image shows roughly the same hemisphere as a Cassini view (center image) also obtained near closest approach, but at a considerably lower resolution and severely underexposed.

Nope, but there are at least two NMR spectroscopists

Anyway, here is a scaled combination of your ""poor man's UV comparison" with Fig. 1c from the ALICE paper by Stern et al.
It shows the position of some molecular species (but nothing sulfur-containing...)
Maybe someone who has more time can look for gas-phase UV spectra of sulfur-containing compounds in the net ...

A few rings pics up as well from March 1. The newest one on the page, taken at 21:19:04, appears to contain Adrastea.

Click to view attachment

--Emily

Isn't Adrastea kind of on the wrong side of the rings here? The high phase (something like 140 deg) would also make it hard to spot here. It looks more like a star to me.

Hmm. Yeah, I think you're right. Sorry about that.

--Emily

Here's a comparison of one of the new back-lit ring images to one seen with the sun still behind the spacecraft. I've tried to match the ring features -- I may be way wrong on this but I thought I'd give it a shot. These things really do look quite different from the other side. Both images have been enhanced with a high-pass filter and the contrast has been stretched on the darker image.

Click to view attachment

It is interesting to compare this spectrum of the Io torus with a spectrum of the torus obtained by the EUV spectrometer aboard Voyager 1, published in 1979 in Science v. 204, p. 979. Broadfoot et al wrote that it was a typical spectrum of the torus, but that "the brightness of the features vary with time by as much as a factor of 2 with no apparent relationship to the position of Io. Although the major emission features of the torus are always present, the spectral content of data obtained at different times and at different positions also varies."

The 1979 Voyager I spectrum is dominated by the strong peaks at about 685 and 833 A, which are more than twice as strong as any other peaks in that spectrum. Yet these features do not stand out in the 2007 spectrum; they are weaker than those at 1020, 1070, and 1200 A. The features at 1020 and 1070 appear in both 1979 and 2007, and they seem to have about the same relative strength in 1979 as they do in 2007. However, both members of the pair are stronger than the 1200 feature in 1979 but both are much weaker than it in 2007.

martin

A color image (finally!) of Io is up on the NH website

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho...ges/032807.html

And me without my Photoshop here at work. Or I'd colorize the LORRI image with the MVIC one right away. (Looks at watch, waits...)

Here's my version, not as good as others' will be. They very kindly released the MVIC image enlarged to what appears to be just about exactly half the resolution of the LORRI image.

Click to view attachment

--Emily

Here's my version.

Click to view attachment

And here's a 16 bit Adobe RGB lossless JPEG2000, just for the heck of it:

Image [668KB]

-um3k

We have all gotten so used to "boring" images where the world is essentially a sphere, lit on one hemisphere. This image breaks the norm in so many ways:

Three or four plumes.
The shadow of Io upon the plume.
Illumination of some origin (refracted through the rest of the plume?) showing us the shaded portion of the plume.
Mountains peeking up from the dark side to have their peaks sunlit.
The cherry-red source of Tvashtar's activity.

Great work, Emily and um3k.

Um3k's version was so much better than mine that I had to take another crack at it. This one doesn't use the press-released LORRI image, it uses the raw ones, so I'm missing one of the nightside plumes (which must be stretched out of existence in the raw JPEGged versions). I used the left side of the 20-millisecond exposure and the right side of the 75-millisecond exposure.


--Emily

Here's my version of this fantastic Io image in real color (Lorri panchromatic image used as green, channels mixed to create a synthetic red channel from the methane and panchromatic data). Perhaps not very striking but is looks "real"

Stunning new data now in from LEISA. The images are much sharper than I had expected, not to mention that each scan contains "250 IR wavelengths". This is imaging spectroscopy at its best.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho...ges/033007.html

Interesting -- New Horizons' Jupiter encounter press released images have all just been added to Photojournal. That's convenient! Photojournal continues to be one-stop shopping for great space images.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/new

--Emily

In addition to the new Io images volcanopele posted about today, there was also a new Callisto image added recently. That gives two, enough for an animation I think we're waiting for two more.
Click to view attachment

While I'm posting animations I'll add the current one for Ganymede. We're still waiting for the eclipse observations from Feb. 25 and three sets that were taken on March 4 at around twice the distance of the highest-res view in this animation.
Click to view attachment

--Emily

Beautiful work everyone.....

Beautiful work New Horizons....

Seeing those posts of Callisto and Ganymede images..... as I watch the animations ... marveling over how different these ice worlds are from each other even though their bulk compositions are so similar. I remember seeing such images from the Voyagers as they neared their closest approaches.... how all of us at that time wondered, "what would we see"? And out limited terrestrial imaginations failed us totally.

If you include Titan and Triton in the roughly half and half ice/rock mix, what a study in contrasts.

Callisto with that ancient cratered face worked by sublimating CO2 towers, hiding some kind of ocean under the ice shell while it's bulk is not even fully diffferentiated.

Ganymede displays a slighty younger, but still battered, surface. But under those craters and tectonic streaches is a hot rocky core capable of generating it's own magnetic field in concert with an induced field from the salty seas under the skin. Some aggresive tidal churnings woke this moon up.

Titan - almost a twin in size to Ganymede. No magnetic field, but so what! Everything else bespeaks a dynamic world of wind, rain, and internal ammonia churnings.

Triton... with nitrogen corks popping apace........................ a cosmic cantalope just waiting to be touched by
inquisitive apes from a totally alien world closer to the sun.

And NOW little tiny Enceladus.... revealing fractures we could crawl into... direct connects to Saknussemn seas..............................................

Ain't Nature grand beyond our Earth-centric imaginations!!!!

Craig

Callisto may be "boring" but if you take the image on the NewHorizons website
and do a slight rescaling, you can view the globe of Callisto in 3d stereo!
The image shows Callisto from 2 different angles. this works for Callisto because it rotates
so slowly and does not change appreciable over the long time period required to take
these two pictures. It doesnt work for Europa because it is spinning so fast.

we are too far away to see individual structures in 3d but this makes a nice view.
just stare and let your eyes cross.

paul

Hey Paul, nice to see you around here!

When I tried your stereo pair, I was getting the reverse image, so I flipped the images in the image I attached below to make Callisto an outie, rather than an innie.

Click to view attachment

now its an innie for me! ouch!

thanks, that should make it doable for everybody...

Welcome to UMSF, DrShank!

--Emily

Yeah, but then I was seeing bumps when I was looking at dunes earlier, so maybe my brain is just playing tricks today.

Well if somebody would make anaglyph of those images....it would be...

Oh, like this one:

Click to view attachment

The Flat Callisto Society isn't going to like this at all...

here is an alternate version, with the red&blue channels swapped for red=left viewing.
cheers,
paul

Leveler heads will prevail...

Welcome, Dr. Shank, and thanks for the illuminating images (you too, VP!) For some odd reason I always thought of Callisto as pretty smooth...there's a lot more surface relief there than I'd realized. That "ocean" must be pretty far under the ice...might be more appropriate to think of it as an upper mantle composed of pressurized liquid water!

Yes, Welcome DrShank!

Nothing boring about Callisto.... just look at the Galileo high res images!

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA03455.jpg

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA01630.jpg

And how the heck does an undifferentiated moon end up with an interior ocean?! Yet the magnetic signature is cleary there. That ocean is 200km under the surface. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01478

What is Callisto trying to tell us?

Craig

Based on all those craters, I would say "ouch" would be a likely answer.

That is not the signature of salty ice water, in our experience with the earth, that is the signature of iron. Our magnetic field is much more constant over the oceans at all depths.

Craig

Several new images showed on the LORRI raw images page yesterday, including three sequences of Io images (discussed in the Io thread), another 2x2 mosaic of Oval BA, and a new image of Callisto.

BIS June 2007 issue of "Spaceflight" magazine will have my article on New Horizons. Would like to thank UMSF-member Bjorn Jonsson for the use of his planet Jupiter comparison photo of fly-bys since Pioneer 10

A nice set of images of the area around the Great Red Spot is now up. Here is my quick, one in the morning version of it. Can't wait to see the released version

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Another stab at it, in glorious Fudge-O-Vision:

Click to view attachment

Oh MY, wow I'm speech less. SO beautiful.

Awesome pic!

In fact, if you look near the top of the frame(s), you can see what appear to be wave clouds near the edge of resolution, and I don't think they're imaging artifacts. IIRC, the Voyagers saw similar features, but any way you slice it, it's an incredible picture.

Is it me or has the number of images on the SOC site decreased again?

--Emily

I've totally lost track of which images are "new" and which are not because of the way they insert newly downlinked data in a chronological order. I'd have preferred if newly downloaded stuff was added to the top of the page, it still contains timestamps and it would be a quick way to see what's new.

A NASA TV Science Update on New Horizons discoveries at Jupiter is scheduled for May 1.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Breaking.html