New Horizons Pluto Mission update thread

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Just to clarify, that was the speed Boost it got from Jupiter, 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph), is about the speed it is traveling aproaching
Planet Pluto..............by damn there was 9 planet's for 50 years when I grew up, and there still is !!!!
Oh how I remeber being glued to the TV in the late 60's/70's watching Gemini & Apollo's !!!!
Indeed it's just as exciting now !! and love that Pluto actually has a mini cosmo system of it's own !!!

You took the words out of my mouth. When i was a kid all this was science fiction.
We didnt own a telly in 1969 so i watched the first moon landing with my Dad through a shop window in Aberystwyth.

 

[revin]

Eye's on Pluto Awesome Program !!!
Hurry and grab it, and it's fun to play with

EDIT: We made part's for this also

 

[Ikaruga]

Yep, a decade of fuel will allow some exploration of the Kuiper belt, but leave it hundreds of years from the Oort Cloud.

We can always hope that one day we find an ability to fuel something long enough to reach it.

We could have nuclear propulsion since the middle of the last decade (example: Orion drive). That could be used to reach everything "pretty fast" (compared to chemical propulsion), it's just humanity's fear of everything "nuclear" what's holding us back to use it.

Just to clarify, that was the speed Boost it got from Jupiter, 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph), is about the speed it is traveling aproaching
Planet Pluto

"Just to clarify", I was talking about the relative velocity to Pluto (since that's the most logical reference point when we talk about New Horizons (or so I thought at least), and that's 13.79 km/s at the time I write this post. Yes the space craft was traveling very fast once indeed. Sorry if my words were confusing, here is a velocity curve diagram:

 

[R-T-B]

We didnt own a telly in 1969 so i watched the first moon landing with my Dad through a shop window in Aberystwyth.

And now we're here in the future, and all I can think of when british folks say "telly" is Teletubbies. (which is also a product of Britain, by the way...)

The future is scarier than we could ever have imagined.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Tantalizing signs of geology on Pluto are revealed in this image from New Horizons taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) away. At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features. This image views the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon, and includes the so-called “tail” of the dark whale-shaped feature along its equator. (The immense, bright feature shaped like a heart had rotated from view when this image was captured. Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale.


The image was taken on Thursday from a distance of 5.4 million km

The probe's latest picture released on Saturday has started to give scientists some real indications of the geology on the dwarf world.

The new black-and-white view reveals a vast band of patterned terrain stretching around the globe for roughly 1,500km.
Nasa's spacecraft is due to flyby the distant mini-planet on Tuesday.
When it does so, it will be just 12,500km above the surface.
At that point, its telescopic camera, Lorri, will be acquiring images at a resolution that is better than 100m per pixel.
But for the moment, features still have a rather blurred look about them.
This latest shot from Lorri was taken on Thursday when New Horizons was still 5.4 million km from its target.
At this distance, the resolution is 27km per pixel. Nonetheless, even at this range, there is plenty to excite the geologists.
You can still see just below the patterned band the very dark terrain that scientists have dubbed "the whale". Not visible anymore, however, is the very bright region that looked like a heart in earlier images. This has rotated out of view.
It will, though, come back around, and will be the face of the 2,300km-wide world that is presented to New Horizons at closest approach.

"Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.

 

[revin]

Is everyone watching thru Eyes on Pluto ?
It's awesome seeing it turn and shoot and send back the data

Just about 31,000 mph and it still pick's out the target !!!!

EDIT: 1P.M. CST DATA on the way back to us !!!!!

 

[Ikaruga]

Just to clarify, that was the speed Boost it got from Jupiter, 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph), is about the speed it is traveling aproaching
Planet Pluto

lol I just saw what numbers I put there. I did not check until now, you are right, sorry and thanks for the heads-up. I copy pasted the wrong numbers and didn't even realize what I was doing. (I edited that post).

Thanks again

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

The latest picture of Pluto shows the face of the dwarf planet that will not be seen during next week's historic flyby.

The US space agency's New Horizons probe was less than 2.5 million km from the diminutive world on Saturday and closing in fast.

Come Tuesday, it will be grabbing shots from an altitude of just 12,500km.

But the newly published image, showing Pluto's "spots", is of the hemisphere that will soon rotate out of view.

It will not be seen again until after New Horizons has gone behind the 2,300km-wide dwarf, and then only in the faint light reflected off the little planet's biggest moon, Charon.

That in itself should make for some fascinating science, however, because it will tell researchers what happens on Pluto's dark side.

Some models predict that its nitrogen-rich atmosphere snows out in the deep cold of night.

The mission team will be able to determine if this is so by studying changes in the patterns of reflectivity.

Pluto's four dark spots first came into focus at the end of June.

The intrigue is their regular spacing and size, with each being about 480km across.

Closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday is set for exactly 11:49:59 GMT (12:49:59 BST; 07:49:59 EDT).


The BBC will be screening a special Sky At Night programme called Pluto Revealed on Monday 20 July,

Nice little fact
Moving at a speed of 30,800 miles (49,570 kilometers) per hour, it is the fastest spacecraft ever launched.

 

[R-T-B]

Those spots...

Someone was going to say it...

 

[Ikaruga]

Nice little fact
Moving at a speed of 30,800 miles (49,570 kilometers) per hour, it is the fastest spacecraft ever launched.

Another little fact that while New Horizons is indeed the fastest spacecraft ever "escaped" from earth, but Helios 2 still holds the speed record with a staggering 70.22 km/s (252,792 km/h or 157,078 mi/h)

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

NASA's £460m mission to photograph and explore the furthest reaches of the solar system is running on the same processor that you used to play Tomb Raider in 1996



The probe is powered by a 32-bit Mongoose V processor which is based on the same MIPS R3000 which featured in the original Sony PlayStation.

While the chip runs at just 12MHz, it was enough to handle Tomb Raider and NASA believe it will also be sufficient to explore the furthest reaches of the solar system.

Actually, there are two computer systems, each running on one of the processors: one to handle data and one for guidance and control. And each system is duplicated.

So the probe actually has the computing power of four PlayStations.

“The Mongoose-V processor analyses positional information, distributes operating commands to multiple spacecraft subsystems, collects and processes instrument data, and sends bursts of data back to Earth,” says Alexandru Voica of MIPS owner Imagination Technologies.

“It also runs an advanced autonomy algorithm that allows the probe to auto-correct any issues or contact operators on Earth for help.”

 

[Ikaruga]

The probe is powered by a 32-bit Mongoose V processor which is based on the same MIPS R3000 which featured in the original Sony PlayStation.

While the chip runs at just 12MHz, it was enough to handle Tomb Raider and NASA believe it will also be sufficient to explore the furthest reaches of the solar system.

Actually, there are two computer systems, each running on one of the processors: one to handle data and one for guidance and control. And each system is duplicated.

So the probe actually has the computing power of four PlayStations.

I think the Playstation was using the R3000A which ran at 33Mhz, the Mongoose-V is radiation hardened and clocked slower, but it has onchip cache and includes a MIPS R3010 FPU and it costs more than $21000 each (here are its radiation test results: http://radhome.gsfc.nasa.gov/radhome/papers/b110897.html) I also read somewhere that they never do multitasking on the CPU to save power, but don't remember where.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

info here
Alexandru Voica of MIPS owner Imagination Technologies.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

If ever i wanted a live feed now would be the time.

"New Horizons has transformed our view of this distant moon from a nearly featureless ball of ice to a world displaying all kinds of geologic activity," said McKinnon, who's based at Washington University in St. Louis.

The most noticeable crater in the new photo, which was received at mission control today (July 12), is about 60 miles (100 km) wide and lies near Charon's south pole. The brightness of the rays emanating from the crater suggests that it formed relatively recently, researchers said.

The crater's floor is significantly darker than surrounding areas, perhaps because the impact that gouged out the crater exposed different material than that found on the surface. It's also possible that material at the bottom of the crater simply has a larger grain size and therefore reflects less sunlight, mission team members said.

Charon is by far the largest of Pluto's five known moons. At about 750 miles (1,200 km) in diameter, Charon is about half as wide as the dwarf planet itself.

 

[Norton]

Charon is by far the largest of Pluto's five known moons.

Latest picture of Charon just in but...

Spoiler: That's no moon....

Sorry, someone had to do it

 

[dorsetknob]

Latest picture of Charon just in but...

Spoiler: That's no moon....

Sorry, someone had to do it

God Help us its left its Parking orbit around Saturn where to next

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

[written by Amanda Zangari]
http://www.planetary.org/connect/ou...ngari.html?referrer=https://www.google.co.uk/


LORRI, our high resolution imager, has an 8-inch (20cm) aperture. The diffraction limit (how much an 8” telescope can magnify) is 3.05 mircorad. which is just over half the size of single pixel 4.95 microrad. So if we swapped out the current sensor with a higher res one, we couldn’t do much better because of the laws of physics. A bigger telescope would solve that problem, but then it would make the spacecraft heavier, which require more fuel to send to Pluto AND a longer time to get there, because the spacecraft is more massive. We launched Pluto on the largest, most powerful rocket available at the time (the Atlas V, with extra boosters), so again we’re limited by physics: “At the time” doesn’t mean best ever. The Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, was actually more powerful.

More megapixels also means more memory. For example, LORRI images are made up of a header and then the 1024x1024 array of numbers that make up our image and go from 0 to 65535 (216). There’s not really a way to make that info smaller if we went to 2048x2048. We could downlink a compressed version, but we want the full info eventually.

We could have a bigger hard drive. At some point either a very short time ago or a in the next few days, we’re wiping the entire hard drive in prep for the encounter. So having a larger hard drive would have been nice, and yeah we could use that, and today’s tech would probably get us a bigger one.. We are filling up said HD during the encounter. On the other hand, we will be downlinking stuff until the end of 2016, so bigger hard drive means we need the spacecraft to survive even longer to finish it (we are not planning on it breaking, but it’s a risk, so we are downloading a compressed version of everything, which will all be down in November, but think really lossy JPEGS).

Our downlink rate is actually limited by the spacecraft power. We have all the plutonium we could get our hands on, but there was actually a shortage at the time. As a result, even Voyager has a higher downlink rate then we do. :-( It’s still really cool we can run all our instruments with less power than an incandescent light would use.

So yeah, the things that would make our mission better, super smartphone tech can’t really fix. It’s all physics. And lack of Plutonium (We wants moar!!! Tell your congressfolk, we can’t go to the outer solar system on solar. Us planetary folk would love missions to Uranus and Neptune.)



little fact
It took astronauts three days to reach the Moon. New Horizons passed it in nine hours.

 

[R-T-B]

Does New Horizons seriously use a spinning platter hard disk, or is this just terminology for a flash disk?

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

I am reading that there are two solid state drives but i cant find the specs....yet.

heres a bit more
For data storage, New Horizons carries two low-power solid-state recorders (one backup) that can hold up to 8 gigabytes each. The main processor collects, compresses, reformats, sorts and stores science and housekeeping (telemetry) data on the recorder – similar to a flash memory card for a digital camera – for transmission to Earth through the telecommunications subsystem.

The Command and Data Handling system is housed in an Integrated Electronics Module that also contains a vital guidance computer, the communication system and part of the REX instrument.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Systems-and-Components.php

 

[RCoon]

Great website to illustrate just how far apart planetary bodies are from each other:

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

nice one @RCoon i think i wore my mouse out

 

[revin]

"Seriously. When are we gonna be there?" So if you're planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

little fact
The best pictures of Pluto will depict surface features as small as 25 meters (about 80 feet) across.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Very good vid, latest news, amazingly Pluto is bigger than we thought.

http://www.space.com/29850-new-hori...e-coverage.html?cmpid=NL_SP_weekly_2015-07-13

 

[dorsetknob]

bigger than a dwarf planet now and with no less than 5 Moons many still consider it a true planet
Mr Tyson crap whats his name you need to review your error
the premise and arguments used to demote Pluto are shown to be totaly inaccurate