I have cropped the image and tried to make a comparison with another Pluto image, somethings fit, somethings don't, no science here folks...

This is absolutely amazing, I never expected NH to image Pluto this early in its mission. Can't wait to see Pluto images in 2015 .

Wow.

Alan Stern...Do you have any idea as to what Kuiper Belt Object you will visit after the Pluto/Charon flyby?

John,
Alan's team doesn't have a firm destination yet for the probe after Pluto. The volume beyond Pluto where New Horizons could potentially travel is currently in an unfavorable position for detection. See the recent article about NH imaging Pluto? Any potential KBOs NH would visit are in a similar star field, with many faint stars and difficult to detect. Once the volume has moved out of the crowded star field, and some new survey telescopes come on-line, the team expects to find potential targets in the ~50km range. There's some additional detail either here or on the NH website.

Why is everyone so surprised that NH can "see" Pluto? Pluto is visible from pretty modest telescopes here on Earth, and NH doesn't have to deal with any light pollution. Other than being in a crowded star field, Pluto should be a piece of cake for NH. More importantly, when are the Saturn, Neptune and Uranus photos?

I think that my surprise is that NH itself may be involved in the search. I had thought that telescopes such as Pan-STARRS were assumed to have that role.

We don't have a KBO picked out for flyby and won't until 2014 or 2015. We won't even begin
to search until 2011 and 2012. The search will be made by groundbased telescopes. NH will
not be involved in the search because it cannot compete with the sensitivity of larger telescopes on Earth and
we don't have the bandwidth to send huge numbers of images down (what in the Pluto sighting release gave
you the impression we would search with NH?)

-Alan

ps. As to the Pluto sighting image, our resolution is too poor from this range to even see Charon. You can't
just blow up the image and expect it to resolve Pluto for comparison to a map: the scales of the HST
map and the LORRI image are different by a factor of about 20.

...And I was going to swear I was seing an abyss somewhere in those images...

Reading it again with knowledge to the contrary, I can't see it either... It was probably a combination of the technique described for finding an object moving against the background starfield coupled with the mention that LORRI will be used to "navigate" to eventual Kuiper Belt targets.

I didn't know if there was some point beyond Jupiter where LORRI would be effective in searching in that manner. Perhaps you could compress the images to a few bytes of monochrome, or even do the compares onboard.

Probably too much to hope for that we get lucky and Pluto (and/or Charon, Nix, Hydra) occult a bright star as seen from NH between now and 2015 . . . .

To answer my boss's question, I think the sentence in the release "This latest optical navigation test simulated the conditions under which LORRI will be required to find a Kuiper Belt object (and potential flyby target) as New Horizons approaches Pluto" may have caused the confusion. LORRI will not be used to discover a flyby target, but it *will* be used to obtain a precise position for the target KBO in the weeks before the KBO flyby. The KBO orbit determination that's possible from the ground will not be accurate enough to target the flyby to the required precision. So we will use LORRI to pick up the KBO as soon as possible on approach (a month or two before the encounter) and use the position derived from those observations to adjust the spacecraft trajectory to enable a close flyby.

And Ustrax, there is indeed a huge abyss in this picture, between the spacecraft and Pluto...

John.

It would be pretty easy to put something into solar orbit that deliberately went to the places in interplanetary space where occultations are happening (they are, by the thousands, all the time, in empty space).

It might be a neat mission one day, to have some serious number crunching searching for occultations of objects of interest, flying through huge numbers of such zones. With a few craft flying in formation tens of miles apart, the size and shape of KBOs, along with possible atmospheres, could be detected from faraway with a sort of virtual long-range "pushbroom". In essence, it would provide a very small science return on a very large number of bodies.

some comments on KBO candidates search.

you know, i studied KBO orbits some time ago and obtained some interesting plots and statistics. Here are orbit tracks of 1212 known KBOs from Jan 2010 till Jul 2015. Red line is NH trajectory till Pluto encounter. Obviously there are irregularities in the object distribution : some regions are rich in KBOs and some arent. The most unpopulated is a wide gap in lower right side and i wonder if this resulted only from unfavorable conditions for earth-based observations or some Pluto-related gravitational resonanses take place? In any case NH is going to travel through this unexplored region and it seems there are lack of worthy (really large) candidates. After Pluto NH will pass by only one currently known KBO object - 1994 JR1 (blue line) - in the middle of 2016 at distance of 0.5 AU.

Nice graphic! The reason for the gap is indeed due to unfavorable earth-based conditions- that's the region occupied by the Milky Way, which is unfortunately where we need to search for our KBO flyby targets. We are currently honing our skills in finding moving objects against a very crowded star background...

John.

Time to take a break from the inner solar system...

I see that a few of the New Horizons-related preprints for an upcoming issue of Space Science Reviews are online.

800 MILL KM DOWN

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?t...s=1&brite=1

And alot more to go

MILES AND MORE...

Any idea what NH can get for traveling 800 million kilometres?

A set of two whisky glasses I think.

Doug

315 days of rest every year until it gets to Pluto.

I just saw where New Horizons made Popular Science magazine's ""Best of What's New" in 2006 list.

So did Venus Express and STEREO, by the way.

A preprint of the SWAP paper has been added.

In my own oppinion this is what it takes to be a great mission concept in what concerns urgent responses in the a future emergency...

" Since its arrival in April, Venus Express—built in record time by using the same basic design from its predecessor, Mars Express"

If we're in danger we know who to talk with...

Note the Ralph and LORRI papers have just been added.

If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend reading Alan Stern's intro paper. It gives a fairly candid backstory to the PKB solicitation.

I highly recommend to download these papers: They are very detailed and I am afraid they will be taken off the website once they are published in a scientific paper.

Analyst

OT here (sorry), but Alan, if you should happen to read this could you please contact me via the UMSF message system? I just read your overview paper, and if possible I would like some detailed information on NH's fault protection system as a possible input for my master's thesis. Thanks!

(Doug, apologies: I could message him but I don't want to be perceived as a spammer; he's a busy guy! )

NH has no fault protection.

The craft was designed immaculately via the agency of the Lord, and it was constructed without imperfection.

Um...well, that would make the other systems I'm examining look pretty lousy then...

The Hal Weaver et al. paper giving an overview of the New Horizons science payload was placed online today.

And when do we get to see Jupiter from NH as a distant "pale striped dot"? It is almost January already...

I don't understand what you're saying, we already got a Jupiter image taken in September that was much more than a dot. The next few (still distant, but massively better) images will AFAIK be downlinked late January/early Feb. The majority of the flyby data won't be downlinked until a couple of months after the flyby, though. It will then take at least a couple of years to reduce Jupiter to a mere "dot".

Would Jupiter ever have been just a dot to New Horizons cameras, even from Earth?

Nope, a couple of tens of pixels across at least.

Oh the pain of waiting!!!

According to this page:

http://www.yaohua2000.org/cgi-bin/New%20Horizons.pl

NH is now less than 100,000,000 Km from Jupiter

That link really gives you a good feel for just how fast NH is travelling!

Airbag

In the tradition of NASA "gee-whiz", NH is traveling a million km every 13.7 hours along its present trajectory. Sure is a good thing there aren't any bugs in interplanetary space...NH's windshield would be a real mess!

Nprev-- NH has a fault detection and correction system in software that protects against a bit over
100 potential issues-- some minor (e.g., start tracker getting cold/ho, turn on/off star tracker heater)
to major (loss of comm or loss of fuel). If you email me I'll send you a technical paper from the IAS
about the system.

-Alan

Less than 95,000,000 km from Jupiter now, and I'm expecting images much better than September release.
Does anybody know when we could see the new image release or do we have to wait after the Jupiter flyby?

Thanks a million, Alan; I just sent you an e-mail. Enjoy the new year; I know we're all going to enjoy NH @ Jupiter!

Wait til Jupiter gets ahold of it.

I'm glad I'm not in NH's way.

FWIW, my son was born almost a year ago, and his name is on NH. NH will fly by Jupiter just as he's starting to walk and talk. He'll be able to appreciate it, though, when it gets to Pluto.

UMSFers--

FYI NASA has scheduled a press conference regarding the first year of the NH mission and the upcoming Jupiter flyby for Jan 18th.

On the same day, we'll be releasing the Jupiter flyby press kit and an 11-frame movie of Jovian meteorology to be taken by LORRI
early next week.

-Alan

The Young et al. paper, "New Horizons: Anticipated Scientific Investigations at the Pluto System," was just added today.

BTW, I've been keeping an eye out for the REX paper. If anyone sees it before I do, please post a notice here

Awesome! Can't wait

New PI Perspective:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspec...ive_current.php

Okay, the aforementioned mentioned REX paper (Tyler et al.) is now online, as well as a mission design paper by Guo and Farquhar. Click here.

New Jupiter images are set to be released next week on the NH site:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/011007.htm

New Horizons will be exactly 4,000,000,000 kilometers away from 134340 Pluto at 2007-01-19 18:49:08 UTC.

2454120.284880148 = A.D. 2007-Jan-19 18:50:13.6448 (CT)

== Sun ==
Range: 738,866,580 km (4.939018 AU)
Range-rate: 17,846.202 m/s
Velocity: 19,774.088 m/s

== Earth ==
Range: 833,230,977 km (5.569805 AU)
Range-rate: -2,844.746 m/s
Velocity: 27,101.859 m/s

== Jupiter ==
Range: 64,081,751 km (0.428360 AU)
Range-rate: -18,599.807 m/s
Velocity: 18,614.977 m/s

== 134340 Pluto ==
Range: 4,000,000,000 km (26.738348 AU)
Range-rate: -18,417.111 m/s
Velocity: 19,276.503 m/s

Images at :

Jupiter and Io

Nice.