New Horizons Pluto Mission update thread

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

The build up has started (for me) and yes i get excited by stuff like this.

Nasa reveals new images of Pluto's four 'alien black spots' as it says New Horizons probe is back in action

• Nasa lost touch with the space probe for 89 minutes on Saturday 4 July
• New Horizons' autopilot put spacecraft's main computer into 'safe mode'
• Scientists leading the mission hope to have it fully operation by 7 July
• New Horizons is due to be the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto on July 14

Nasa scientists say they have fixed a glitch that saw them lose contact with the New Horizon’s space probe just days before its close encounter with Pluto - and have released a new image of four unknown 'black spots' on the dwarf planet.

The spacecraft entered ‘safe mode’, cutting contact with the Earth over the weekend, due to a timing flaw as it performed operations ahead of its fly past Pluto next week.

Scientists leading the mission say they hope to return the space probe to full operation by Tuesday and the mission to fly within 7,750 miles (12,500km) of Pluto on July 14 will go ahead as planned

'The computer was trying to do two things at the same time, and the two were more than the processor could handle at the same time, so the processor overloaded,' said Nasa's Glen Fountain, explaining the loss of contact.

'We knew it would take about an hour for the spacecraft to transmit to Earth from the backup computer.
'We started looking for signal on backup side, and found it when expected.
'We looked at data, figured out what was happening, and started to put a plan in place to recover.
The space agency released these never before seen images of the dwarf planet, the last taken before the team lost contact.
'These are the most recent high-resolution views of Pluto sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, including one showing the four mysterious dark spots on Pluto that have captured the imagination of the world,' Nasa said before the briefing on the mission.
The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) obtained these three images between July 1 and 3 of 2015, prior to the July 4 anomaly that sent New Horizons into safe mode.

The left image shows, on the right side of the disk, a large bright area on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be seen in close-up by New Horizons on July 14.

The three images together show the full extent of a continuous swath of dark terrain that wraps around much of Pluto’s equatorial region.
The western end of the swath (right image) breaks up into a series of striking dark regularly-spaced spots, each hundreds of miles in size, which were first detected in New Horizons images taken in late June.
Intriguing details are beginning to emerge in the bright material north of the dark region, in particular a series of bright and dark patches that are conspicuous just below the center of the disk in the right image.
In all three black-and-white views, the apparent jagged bottom edge of Pluto is the result of image processing. The inset shows Pluto’s orientation, illustrating its north pole, equator, and central meridian running from pole to pole.
The colour version of the July 3 LORRI image was created by adding color data from the Ralph instrument gathered earlier in the mission.
The left image shows, on the right side of the disk, a large bright area on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be seen in close-up by New Horizons on July 14.
The three images together show the full extent of a continuous swath of dark terrain that wraps around much of Pluto’s equatorial region.
The western end of the swath (right image) breaks up into a series of striking dark regularly-spaced spots, each hundreds of miles in size, which were first detected in New Horizons images taken in late June.
Intriguing details are beginning to emerge in the bright material north of the dark region, in particular a series of bright and dark patches that are conspicuous just below the center of the disk in the right image.
In all three black-and-white views, the apparent jagged bottom edge of Pluto is the result of image processing. The inset shows Pluto’s orientation, illustrating its north pole, equator, and central meridian running from pole to pole.

The colour version of the July 3 LORRI image was created by adding color data from the Ralph instrument gathered earlier in the mission.

 

[R-T-B]

'The computer was trying to do two things at the same time, and the two were more than the processor could handle at the same time, so the processor overloaded,' said Nasa's Glen Fountain, explaining the loss of contact.

Nasa needs to learn to multithread.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

The spacecraft carries two computer systems, the Command and Data Handling system and the Guidance and Control processor. Each of the two systems is duplicated for redundancy, for a total of four computers. The processor used is the Mongoose-V, a 12 MHzradiation-hardened version of the MIPS R3000CPU. Multiple clocks and timing routines are implemented in hardware and software to help prevent faults and downtime. To conserve heat and mass, spacecraft and instrument electronics are housed together in IEMs (Integrated Electronics Modules). There are two redundant IEMs. Including other functions such as instrument and radio electronics, each IEM contains 9boards. On March 19, 2007 the Command and Data Handling computer experienced an uncorrectable memory error and rebooted itself, causing the spacecraft to go into safe mode. The craft fully recovered within two days, with some data loss on Jupiter's magnetotail. No impact on the subsequent mission is expected.[26]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

 

[R-T-B]

An old MIPS chip. I guess it's simplicity is what makes it so easy to harden for the radiation of space. Makes sense but still kinda lulzy that it can't even run two things at once.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

On Monday, New Horizons was just under nine million km from Pluto, but 4.7 billion km from Earth.

The vast distance to the probe's home world means a radio signal takes about 4 hours and 25 minutes from sending to receipt.

Over the coming days, the spacecraft will send back pictures that show Pluto and its main moon, Charon, getting bigger and bigger.

Already, the far-off views are generating considerable excitement.

Pluto is seen to be reddish in colour and to have a series of mysterious spots. By comparison, Charon is grey. A lot of interest so far has centred on its dark polar cap.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Lately it seems we are finding things out in our Solar Systemat a record pace! Still waiting to find out more about the pyramid and bright spots o Ceres. And now we have here some dark spot excitement on Pluto as well as the apparent opposite chemical makeup of Pluto and Charon. It would be nice to find out which was the wanderer and which grabbed the other.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Scientists have released their latest map of Pluto, using images from the inbound New Horizons spacecraft.

We’re only a day from reaching everyone’s favourite demoted planet—a Pluto Day, that is. The icy dwarf world rotates once every 6 days, 9 hours, and 22 minutes

The map combines images takes between 27 June and 3 July

It unwraps the visible parts of the sphere on to a flat projection, giving another view of the features that have started to emerge in recent days.

Evident are the light and dark patches at the equator, including one long dark band being dubbed "the whale".

The US space agency's (Nasa) New Horizons probe is now less than seven days away from its historic flyby.

It is due to pass over the surface of the dwarf planet at a distance of less than 13,000km, grabbing a mass of images and other kinds of scientific data.

The pictures at that point will be pin sharp, showing targets on the surface of the 2,300km-wide body at a resolution of better than 100m per pixel.

In the map on this page, the features are much less resolved. The images from which it was made were acquired between 27 June and 3 July.

They are a combination of shots from the probe's high-resolution, "black and white" camera, Lorri, and its lower-resolution, colour imager known as Ralph.

The whitish area in the centre covers the face of the dwarf planet that will present itself to New Horizons at closest approach.

To the east is the spotty terrain that has generated most discussion so far. Quite what these blobs represent is unclear. Each one is a few hundred km across.

Cradled in the whale's "tail", on the far left of the map, is something that looks like a doughnut. It could be a impact crater or a volcano, although at this resolution any interpretation remains pure speculation.

New Horizons has recovered from its weekend hiccup, in which the probe tripped itself into a protective safe mode and dropped communications with Earth for over an hour.

Engineers say they understand the cause of the computer glitch. This particular type of error, they stress, has now been ruled out for the probe's next few historic days.

The spots are part of a dark band that wraps around much of Pluto's equatorial region
As of Wednesday, New Horizons was less that 7.5 million km from Pluto.

It is moving at nearly 14km/s - far too fast to go into orbit on 14 July. Instead, it must gather as much information as it can while it sweeps past not just Pluto, but its five moons as well: Charon, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.

The flyby occurs on the 50th anniversary of the first successful American pass of Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft.

By way of comparison, New Horizons will gather 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at the Red Planet.

New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.

It is likely to take 16 months to play back every piece of science acquired over the next week.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Sooooo, not much out there past Pluto, except for another suspected planet. After that it's several light years till the next solar system. Thus, I am stoopefied as to why they wouldn't slow it down and put it into orbit of at least Plutu, but preferably Pluto and Charon.

 

[rooivalk]

Sooooo, not much out there past Pluto, except for another suspected planet. After that it's several light years till the next solar system. Thus, I am stoopefied as to why they wouldn't slow it down and put it into orbit of at least Plutu, but preferably Pluto and Charon.

What more interesting than hidden planet in between stars?

 

[rtwjunkie]

What more interesting than hidden planet in between stars?

Even supposing there was a rogue planet wandering around in between solar systems, you'd not send a multi-million dollar probe out into that incomprehensible vastness in the faint hope it might run into something, literally.

Imagine being blindfolded, and at night, and being put into a stadium the size of, say Bangkok, or Los Angeles, and being told to find the one suitcase left somewhere in there.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

This image of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was received on July 8, and has been combined with lower-resolution colour information from the Ralph instrument.

In the early morning hours of July 8, mission scientists received this new view of Pluto—the most detailed yet returned by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons. The image was taken on July 7, when the spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto, and is the first to be received since the July 4 anomaly that sent the spacecraft into safe mode.



This view is centered roughly on the area that will be seen close-up during New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as “the whale,” and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness.



“The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team Leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”

 

[rtwjunkie]

This is exciting!

 

[dorsetknob]

Thus, I am stoopefied as to why they wouldn't slow it down and put it into orbit of at least Plutu, but preferably Pluto and Charon.

something to do with the energy delta needed to get to Pluto in "" our lifetime "" made an orbital mission impossible that's why they settled for a fly by

also not knowing the Orbital debris around Pluto/charon made this highly improbable
A fly by made the most sense
Pluto is suspected of having a tiny ring system as well as the recently found and identified moons
New Horison is/ has doing science to try and identify if there is a ring system and how it will affect the fly by

 

[rtwjunkie]

something to do with the energy delta needed to get to Pluto in "" our lifetime "" made an orbital mission impossible that's why they settled for a fly by

also not knowing the Orbital debris around Pluto/charon made this highly improbable
A fly by made the most sense

Makes sense! Thanks for that. So, it's on a suicide mission, destined to fly "dead" into the vast emptiness outside our solar system.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Epicness before your very eyes and this stuff is only going to get better........much better.


The Launch 29th Jan 2006

 

[dorsetknob]

Makes sense! Thanks for that. So, it's on a suicide mission, destined to fly "dead" into the vast emptiness outside our solar system.

that's the last thing they want Nasa still expect New Horizon to carry on with scientific research well past Pluto and into the Oort Cloud (such as looking for new Plutoids and the general makeup of the Oort Cloud )

As long as Nasa get (Extended) funding for New Horizon's research and New Horizon's can comunicate with earth then onwards it will go ( power is not a problem as its self contained in that respect and is expected to last years).

 

[rtwjunkie]

that's the last thing they want Nasa still expect New Horizon to carry on with scientific research well past Pluto and into the Oort Cloud (such as looking for new Plutoids and the general makeup of the Oort Cloud )

As long as Nasa get (Extended) funding for New Horizon's research and New Horizon's can comunicate with earth then onwards it will go ( power is not a problem as its self contained in that respect and is expected to last years).

Oh, it's nuclear-powered? I thought it was solar-powered, with light from solar radiation being at a premium that far out.

EDIT: N/M, just read it is powerd by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

New Horizons has both spin-stabilized (cruise) and three-axis stabilized (science) modes controlled entirely with hydrazine monopropellant. Additional post launch delta-v of over 290 m/s (1,000 km/h; 650 mph) is provided by a 77 kg (170 lb) internal tank. Helium is used as a pressurant, with an elastomeric diaphragm assisting expulsion. The spacecraft's on-orbit mass including fuel is over 470 kg (1,040 lb) on the Jupiter flyby trajectory, but would have been only 445 kg (981 lb) for the backup direct flight option to Pluto. Significantly, had the backup option been taken, this would have meant less fuel for later Kuiper belt operations.

There are 16 thrusters on New Horizons: four 4.4 N (1.0 lbf) and twelve 0.9 N (0.2 lbf) plumbed into redundant branches. The larger thrusters are used primarily for trajectory corrections, and the small ones (previously used on Cassini and the Voyager spacecraft) are used primarily for attitude control and spinup/spindown maneuvers. Two star cameras (from Galileo Avionica) are used for fine attitude control. They are mounted on the face of the spacecraft and provide attitude information while in spin-stabilized or 3-axis mode. Between star camera readings, knowledge is provided by dual redundant Miniature Inertial Measurement Unit (MIMU) from Honeywell. Each unit contains three solid-state gyroscopes and three accelerometers. Two Adcole Sun sensors provide attitude control. One detects the angle to the Sun, whereas the other measures spin rate and clocking.

A cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) protrudes from one vertex in the plane of the triangle. The RTG will provide about 250 W, 30 V DC at launch, and is predicted to drop approximately 5% every 4years, decaying to 200 W by the encounter with the Plutonian system in 2015. The RTG, model "GPHS-RTG," was originally a spare from the Cassini mission. The RTG contains 10.9 kg (24 lb) of plutonium-238 oxide pellets. Each pellet is clad iniridium, then encased in a graphite shell. It was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy at the Materials and Fuels Complex (formerly Argonne West), a part of the Idaho National Laboratory in Bingham County.[35] Less power than the original design goal was produced because of delays at the United States Department of Energy, including security activities, that delayed production. The mission parameters and observation sequence had to be modified for the reduced wattage; still, not all instruments can operate simultaneously. The Department of Energy transferred the space battery program from Ohio to Argonne in 2002 because of security concerns. There are no onboard batteries. RTG output is relatively predictable; load transients are handled by a capacitor bank and fast circuit breakers.

The amount of radioactive plutonium in the RTG is 10.9 kg (24 lb), about one-third the amount on board the Cassini–Huygens probe when it launched in 1997. That launch was protested by some people. The United States Department of Energy estimated the chances of a launch accident that would release radiation into the atmosphere at 1 in 350, and monitored the launch[36] as it always does when RTGs are involved. It was estimated that a worst-case scenario of total dispersal of on-board plutonium would spread the equivalent radiation of 80% the average annual dosage in North America from background radiation over an area with a radius of 105 km (65 mi)


the propulsion system is for tweaks, gravity drives this machine.

 

[Steevo]

That black finned thing on it is the RTG, and it is plutonium powered, and we could stand next to it with just thin aluminum shielding between us as Plutonium only emits Alpha particles (stopped by a sheet of paper).

The electronics will not work at those cold temperatures so a nuclear power generator is used to provide electricity and heat.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

@dorsetknob mentioned space debris, theres a chance that the flyby could be as close as 2000 miles 3200km because of debris..........that would be brilliant, only 2000 miles from Pluto.



After astronomers announced the discovery of two new moons in the Pluto system, Kerberos and Styx, mission planners started contemplating the possibility of the probe running into unseen debris and dust left over from earlier collisions with the moons.
A study based on 18 months of computer simulations, Earth-based telescope observations and occultations of the Pluto system revealed that the possibility of a catastrophic collision with debris or dust is less than 0.3% on the probe's scheduled course. If the hazard increases, New Horizons will use one of two possible contingency plans, the so-called SHBOTs (Safe Haven by Other Trajectories): the probe could continue on its present trajectory with the antenna facing the incoming particles so the more vital systems would be protected, or, it could position its antenna and make a course correction that would take it just 3000 km from the surface of Pluto where it is expected that the atmospheric drag would clean the surrounding space of possible debris

 

[Norton]

Looks like a planet to me- Neil Degrasse Tyson can suck it!

This is getting better every day... wondering what else this little probe will find out there

 

[Steevo]

Looks like a planet to me- Neil Degrasse Tyson can suck it!

This is getting better every day... wondering what else this little probe will find out there

I think we need to redefine any planet as any orbiting body with a non-spiral trajectory around the nearest star and a spherical shape with at least X% of its mass inside the mean spherical shape.

 

[R-T-B]

Sooooo, not much out there past Pluto, except for another suspected planet. After that it's several light years till the next solar system. Thus, I am stoopefied as to why they wouldn't slow it down and put it into orbit of at least Plutu, but preferably Pluto and Charon.

Lies, Kuiper Belt has many objects to look at.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I think we need to redefine any planet as any orbiting body with a non-spiral trajectory around the nearest star and a spherical shape with at least X% of its mass inside the mean spherical shape.

I guess that would include my favorite mystery body: Ceres

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Pluto is so far away that astronomers only discovered four of those orbiting bodies in the last decade (the largest, Charon, was discovered in 1978). New analysis of Pluto’s system, gleaned from Hubble Space Telescope images, suggests that three of the small moons—Styx, Nix and Hydra—are locked in close rotation. That keeps them from colliding as they circle the “binary planet” formed by Pluto and Charon.

But that alignment can be thrown into chaos thanks to interactions with those larger bodies and the recently discovered moon Kerberos. Astronomers Mark Showalter and Douglas Hamilton hope their findings, published in Naturetoday, will help explain how planets and their satellites form. Saturn’s cratered, potato-shaped moon Hyperion also has a wobbly rotation, one that is impossible to forecast in advance, unlike the majority of well-behaved, synchronously rotating moons in the solar system.

Read more here.