New Horizons Probe's Images of Jupiter 86
SeaDour writes "The Pluto-bound New Horizons space probe, launched a little over a year ago, recently succeeded in passing through a narrow navigational keyhole by Jupiter. Using the gas giant's tremendous gravity, the craft now has a significant boost toward its final destination, shaving three years off the time it would otherwise spend en-route. As it passed through the Jovian system, the probe took some fantastic images of the neighborhood, including detailed observations of erupting volcanoes on Io, time-lapse photography of Jupiter's tumultuous atmosphere, and the faint ring system that was first discovered in Voyager photography. These new images prove the capabilities of the small probe, which is set to reach Pluto in 2015."
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how the first computers looked like [epemag.com]. And this is how their "hard drives" looked like [fireinthevalley.com].
It was expensive as hell, and the returns were minimal. They dared to do it first, and to improve upon their experience, so today the neighbor kid can whine how he has to wait entire 7 seconds for his physically accurate and photo realistic 3D racing car simulator game to load the entire race track, complete with realistically behaving crowd, plants and atmospheric effects.
NASA reached Pluto with a remotely controlled probe deep in space. You ranted in Slashdot. Congratulations to both for your great achievements.
Re:Great! (You must be joking) (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice attempt at a rant/trolling, but maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
Re:the waiting game? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
You do not launch a god dam cell phone camera on a billion dollar mission and hope to hell that it works.
Do you have any idea at all what it costs to qualify flight hardware?
Take your cost, no matter what it is, and add a couple of million to it. That is at best a starting point. That includes the fact that your cell phone would not work in a high radiation environment. The CCD would be blasted by the radiation environment.
Remember that the launch cost alone is outrageous. The instrument costs are a very small part of the total cost of the mission. A typical instrument costs around 15 million. That includes the design, development, construction, qualification, and scientific analysis of the data.
Before you pass judgment on what is and is not acceptable, please acknowledge that you are not qualified to pass such judgment.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA (tag-teaming with fweeky): 1
Slashdot armchair cynic: 0
I don't suppose the GP has ever tried taking a picture of Jupiter with his fancy camera phone, either. He might find it a little blurry, very grainy, and surprisingly dark. Add in a little radiation and interference from moving through Jupiter's magnetic field and then transmit it 150 million miles, and layer on top of it spectrographic and radar data from the other instruments and you realize the OP's $450 (mass-produced price) cell phone with it's 3mm lens doesn't even count as a toy in comparison.
When you consider that the best images we have of Pluto currently (from the Hubble) are about 0.0005 megapixels of surface data and that New Horizons will pass a fraction of the distance from Pluto that it did from Jupiter, you begin to understand how much bang-for-the-buck this mission has to offer in understanding a body that may be one of the most numerous and least understood type of objects (KBO's) in our solar system.