Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures

sighted writes "The New Horizons probe, on its way to Pluto and beyond, is now speeding toward Jupiter. Today the team released some of the early data and pictures, which are the first close-range shots of the giant planet since the robotic Cassini spacecraft passed that way in 2001."

This just in...

[muindaur (925372)]

Nasa has discovered Jupiters gas was produced by CowboyNeal.

How long does this take?

[XxtraLarGe (551297)]

Does anybody know how long does it take for the photo data to be transmitted from that far away (Both Jupiter and Pluto)? Hours or days? I am still pretty amazed that we can send a probe into space and receive pictures from Jupiter.

Re:How long does this take?

[rumith (983060)]

10 hours from Pluto in average. 45 minutes from Jupiter in average. Don't know whether they'll in their aphelion or perihelion now, so can't say more precisely.

well this is where they are

[rucs_hack (784150)]

their exact position today can be found in the JPL Horizons database
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi [nasa.gov]

so using Sol as Origin [0,0,0], with distance in km and km/s velocity measures:
XYZ position and velocity in Km and Km/sec
V prefix = velocity,

Jupiter
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-3.523007925524937E+08 Y =-7.203651223053448E+08 Z = 1.087397270750013E+07
  VX= 1.158611696091788E+01 VY=-5.127849980674650E+00 VZ=-2.378734986696975E-01

Earth
  A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-7.005151113800500E+07 Y = 1.294518808525130E+08 Z =-1.647040773451328E+03
  VX=-2.669513206382950E+01 VY=-1.429493892074527E+01 VZ=-5.052885705412180E-04

And the Horizons probe itself is here:
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-3.141011231236297E+08 Y =-6.673772181265557E+08 Z = 9.200702373118341E+06
  VX= 1.154291925552546E-01 VY=-1.978644188955009E+01 VZ= 1.493924692614632E-01

However it's too early to work out the times taken for signals to travel based on these positions. I need more coffee.

Re:well this is where they are

[KiloByte (825081)]

Pythagoras' theorem says the distance in R3 (ie, euclidean space) is sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2+(z1-z2)^2).
That is, the distance between Earth and Jupiter right now is: 8.95528824E8 km.

Dividing that by c gives 2987 seconds. So, right now the half-ping is 50 minutes.

By similar calculation, you can get that EarthNew Horizons is 2779.975 s =~ 46 minutes.

Re:

[beckerist (985855)]

A cool slight diversion: this is exactly the reverse process of how Ole Roemer [wikipedia.org] in the 1670's came up with his estimate of the speed of light.

Re:

[cyclomedia (882859)]

does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end, why not just an 8 digit number with 8 decimal places?

i do actually know the TECHNICAL answer: one digit, followed by a bunch of decimal places followed by an exponent is standard scientific notation. Still looks bizzarro to me though

Re:

[rucs_hack (784150)]

I frequently include all values after the decimal place up to the first zero. That seems to help precision. If you cut the number down and remove non zero values, it can really hurt accuracy.

It definatelly helps when it comes to Phobos and Deimos, they are a pain to get right.

Re:well this is where they are

[jslater25 (1005503)]

I like to write zero as 0.00E8. How do you write zero?

Re:well this is where they are

[geobeck (924637)]

does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end...

I just think the 16 decimal places are kind of overkill because, by the time you write them down, everything after the fifth or sixth one has changed because the objects are moving relative to each other.

Re:

[SavvyPlayer (774432)]

I'm more curious that they think they can measure Jupiter's position to a fraction of a millimetre, or the velocities to a fraction of a nanometre per second...

These accuracies result from the mathematics. Why toss out digits simply because we can't be absolutely certain to the fraction of a millimeter/nanosecond of any given celestial object? It costs nothing to keep them and they allow the numbers to be independently verified.

Re:

[SavvyPlayer (774432)]

millimeter/nanosecond of any given celestial object

...millimeter/nanosecond of the position of any given celestial object...

Cranky

Re:well this is where they are

[FallOfDay (1053148)]

The rough & ready, easy-on-the-eye (!), pictorial version is as follows:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php [jhuapl.edu]

Re:

[AvyTech (942143)]

I just got grrly wood. Yay for me.

Re:

[Bucko (15043)]

The New Horizons Site [jhuapl.edu] keeps track of the spacecraft position and distance. According to the last mission update, the light travel time is now over 1h 30m.

Re:

[duh P3rf3ss3r (967183)]

According to the last mission update, the light travel time is now over 1h 30m.

I have no idea where you got that. From the page you sent us to, the distance to the spacecraft is currently 5.57AU. Dividing that by c gives 2779.46 s or 46.32 minutes. Perhaps it's written somewhere on that site that the round trip light time is just over an hour nd a half. But that's not at all the same thing.

Re:How long does this take?

[Tom Womack (8005)]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/science/data_collection.ht ml [jhuapl.edu] says that the transmission is at 38kbit/second from Jupiter, and will be at around 450bit/second from Pluto.

Cassini runs at 82kbit/second from Saturn, but it's a probe with a larger power budget.

The imager takes one-megapixel, 16bpp images, and compresses them to 100kbyte files for initial transmission, saving the originals in a few gigabytes of onboard flash; it can be instructed to send back uncompressed images if there's something interesting visible.

So an image takes about 20 seconds to transmit, plus about six minutes if you want the uncompressed version; and it takes 45 minutes to get to Earth from Jupiter. From Pluto, the images will take half an hour for the preview and twelve hours for the uncompressed image.

Re:How long does this take?

[gsslay (807818)]

Unfortunately it then zips the compressed image into a self-extracting exe, so NASA's anti-virus strips it off at the mail server.

Re:

[Hoi Polloi (522990)]

Unfortunately high speed cable internet connections are not available beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Did anyone remember to tell the probe...

[simm1701 (835424)]

.. that pluto isn't a planet any more???

I certainly hope so, otherwise it could get really embarrassed when it tries to ask for directions!!

All these planets are yours

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

Re:

[zwarte piet (1023413)]

That only applies after 2010.

heh

[Moby Cock (771358)]

Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures

Doctor Manhatten Outraged!

APL???

[markhb (11721)]

What is this APL [jhuapl.edu], and why are they named after a programming language with its own character set [wikipedia.org]?

As a matter of scale...

[(arg!)Styopa (232550)]

Just to give you a sense of scale for Jupiter, the Earth would fit nicely into the Great Red Spot (N/S dims of red spot are almost exactly the same as the diameter of Earth).

Just an Opinion...

[Thumper_SVX (239525)]

I'm really excited about New Horizons. It's a really exciting mission that almost didn't get the support it needed. If you do some Googling you can find out the full story about it.

Hell, I know Pluto isn't considered a planet... but that to me makes NH even more exciting. Pluto is a large KBO (Kuiper Belt Object) and as such has the potential to be a very early remnant of the formation of our solar system. As such, investigating this object and Charon, it's "moon" has the potential to teach us far more about the early existence of the solar system than investigating many other objects. To be honest, I'm MORE excited about a trip to a relatively unknown and uncharted object such as a KBO than I would be over the exploration of another planet (despite the fact that these are arbitrary designations at best)

The NEAR mission was fascinating for the same reason. It was investigation of a relatively unknown object and we learned far more about the nature of asteroids and other deep space objects during that mission than we ever thought possible. If NH even returns half of the information about Pluto that NEAR returned about the asteroid Eros then we will learn an incredible amount about our solar system, and maybe change a few models about solar system formation that might just change some minds.

Good show, NASA. Sometimes you're the butt of a lot of jokes, but there are times you manage some truly remarkable missions (the mars rovers for one) that increase our understanding of the universe and just really excite science geeks like me :)

Wha???

[Cervantes (612861)]

"Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures"

Holy crap, they made another metric/imperial conversion error!

All that distance...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870)]

...and they forgot to load the cameras up with colour film.

Re:

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Wow, that sure sounds like "spooky action at a distance" [wikipedia.org] to me.

Re:

[AndyST (910890)]

> it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009 Voyager I has a speed of about 17 km/s. At that speed it takes 114440 years to fly the 4,4ly to Alpha Centauri.

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

I calculate around 77,000 years (given 17 km/s which understates Voyager 1's speed). 17 km/s is faster than 1/20,000th the speed of light. So Voyager 1 travels one light year in under 20,000 years.

Misinformative

[Cheesey (70139)]

As I understand it, the speed of light applies not only to physical objects, but also information itself. No-one knows any way to move information faster than light. If you've found a way, that's truly revolutionary, but in the meantime your post sounds a bit like a "free energy" claim. Can you back it up with some citations?

Re:

[AndersOSU (873247)]

Your right, the speed of information is limited to c, because as far as we know all information requires a carrier - and, as far as we know, the fastest carrier is light. As I understand it sending information at speeds greater than the speed of light would violate causality.

Imagine that there is a bomb in LA that just went off. Jack Bauer finds a way to make his PDA use quantum entanglement to tell this to Washington before they would be able to detect the event any other way. If some horrendous female

Re:

[Ihlosi (895663)]

4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.

Whoa, I didn't know that these things made 0.1c ...

Wait ... they don't. I think you meant "in later 12009".

Re:Communication a problem

[Teancum (67324)]

I think he has mistaken the idea that Voyager will leave the solar system in 2009, as defined by the region of space where the solar wind is overcome with other stellar matter from the rest of the Milky Way, and presumably in the region of space roughly where the Oort Cloud is likly to be located at. At that point you could presumably suggest that it is in interstellar space and the gravitational influence of the Sun is insignificant compared to other objects in the rest of the Galaxy.

While that is in reality a major accomplishment in terms of having a human artifact leave the solar system, it is a far cry from being able to reach another star system, especially Alpha Centauri. Especially as Alpha Centauri is hardly in the plane of the ecliptic (where most of the planets are located at), requiring some very precise trajectory calculations that would have made the visit to the outer planets by Voyager too difficult to perform.

The primary mission of Voyager was to visit the gas giants of the Solar System, and it did that spectacularly. Anything else it has done or is doing now is incidental extra science, as we are now getting scientific measurements of the environment that is very far from the Earth.

+2 Interesting!? Mod Parent Down

[physicsnick (1031656)]

it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.

Voyager 1 will take on the order of several hundred thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri.

The traditional explanation for this is that the graviton can only travel at the speed of light and as such will take 10 minutes to travel from one particle to the other, so far so good.

The 'traditional' explanation? Gravitons are hypothetical at best, and currently mathematically useless. Quantized force mediators do not need to "intercept" a moving particle at a distance; they are virtual, and there are infinitely many of them in all directions.

By changing the mass of the ball (simple enough to do with a powerful laser)

This is all nonsense. Even if this were true, your probe is also receiving gravitons from every other atom in the universe. The effect of varying a "ball of mass" would not even be measurable. Just because a sizable block of text with "sciency words" is posted doesn't mean it's meaningful, and certainly doesn't deserve mod points. Please mod parent down, and please read things before giving points!

From Wiki, and I know I've read similar on NASA...

[silentounce (1004459)]

but I couldn't find it.

"Voyager 1 is not heading towards any particular star, but in 40,000 years it will be within 1.7 light years of the star AC+793888 in the Camelopardis constellation."

From http://www.daviddarling.info/ [daviddarling.info] :
"An earlier planned route past Neptune would have resulted in the probe coming within 0.8 light-years of Sirius in just under 500,000 years from now - easily the closest and most interesting foreseeable stellar encounter of the four escaping probes. However, the Neptune

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

I glanced at Voyager 1's speed. It's going roughly 17 km/s. That's a bit more than 1/20,000th the speed of light. So it can travel as far as Alpha Centauri currently is in under 100,000 years. A lightyear is long, but not that long when you start talking of hundreds of thousands of years in which to do your traveling. I don't have anything redeeming to say about the grandparent.

Re:

[Cyberax (705495)]

Yes, gravitation moves at the speed of light. That's why you get gravitomagnetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitoelectromagnet ism) which occur when two moving bodies gravitationally interact with each other.

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

It hasn't been directly observed. Experiment has strong agreement with general relativity which implies that gravitation acts at the speed of light.

Re:

[Cyberax (705495)]

It has been measured, see http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0501001 [arxiv.org] . The result of this measurement - speed of gravity is between 0.8c and 1.2c, which is consistent with gravity propagating at 1c.

Re:

[yoprst (944706)]

The explanation is in fact that the gravitons do not move at the speed of light but instead are exchanged instantaneously
/bangs his head against a wall for 30 minutes...
Let's strip you of your academic credentials along with a dude who proposed stripping of academic credentials from global warming sceptics
/returns to banging his head against a wall for another 30 minutes...

Re:

[tgd (2822)]

Somehow I suspect the extent of his scientific credentials is a copy of the Starfleet Technical Manual with pages that are strangely stuck together, and a tattered Burger King hat hung from a nail in his parents' basement.

Another dismissal for erroneous points

[FallOfDay (1053148)]

...this means that the particles must 'know' where each other are going to be in 10 years time. This is quite frankly ridiculous!

You're still thinking in three spatial dimensions plus one of time. Start adding extra dimensions to Einstein's 4D & things aren't so ridiculous - extra dimensions will discount, not time itself but, the effect of time. Why do you think 10D & 11D Superstring/M theories have been postulated?

In this way the rule limiting the exchange of information is kept intact and

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

As previously mentioned these gravitons will instantly arrive at our deep space probe regardless of how distant it actually is, but will not act on it until some time later. The key part is that we have a graviton detector on our probe which measures the number of gravitons received.

You can stop now. Interacting with a graviton detector is an "action". Ie, if we use your model of interaction, the gravitons show up "immediately" and then interact with the graviton detector some time later. BTW, "immediat

Re:

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

> ...only has enough fuel to last until 2020ish

Momentum is forever. I think you're talking about "battery life".

Re:

[Captain Hook (923766)]

I was thinking in terms of thrusters to be able to align the probe towards earth/anything interesting that might be out there such as a Vogon Construction Fleet.

Re:

[Jzor (982679)]

It will be ok if it runs out of thruster power. I'm sure it will run into some sentient mechanical life forms out there that will repair it so it can continue on its mission to learn all that is learnable and transmit it back to the creator.

Re:

[physicsnick (1031656)]

If I recall my particle physics correctly, the way ATLAS at the LHC will be detecting gravitons is via their leptopic decay products, and regard that as the optimal way.

You're thinking of the Higgs boson. We are nowhere near approaching the level of technology required to detect gravitons, and the mathematics they give rise to doesn't even work. The only real reason we have to believe they exist is because the other forces also have quantized mediators.

Re:

[WormholeFiend (674934)]

Because spying on the Mi-Go is more important