New Horizons Phones Home After Pluto Flyby -- Craft Healthy, Data Recorded 134
Tablizer was one of several readers to note that the New Horizons probe has completed its flyby of Pluto and radioed home to confirm that it went without incident. Mission Ops manager Alice Bowman said the spacecraft was healthy, full of data, and sharing telemetry. The images New Horizon collected haven't been downloaded yet, but NASA decided to tide us over by releasing this high-resolution view from the day before. It was taken when the probe was still 768,000 kilometers away with a resolution of 3.8km per pixel. (Closest approach was approximately 12,500km.) They also released an exaggerated-color image of Pluto and Charon which highlights the non-uniformity of both worlds.
Pictures from closest approach are not yet available. Expect another post late Wednesday or early Thursday with those images. The reason for this is that New Horizons can't take pictures and send them to us at the same time, so imaging activity is interspersed with downlinks to Earth to transmit data. Emily Lakdawalla has posted a downlink schedule. On Wednesday afternoon (ET), the probe will transmit three images of Pluto that were taken from 77,000km away, with a resolution of 0.4 km per pixel. They'll be the first three pieces of a mosaic of Pluto's surface, and the dwarf planet will fill all three frames. It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects. (Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system. New Horizon's measurements indicate Pluto is slightly larger than we thought. It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.)
Pictures from closest approach are not yet available. Expect another post late Wednesday or early Thursday with those images. The reason for this is that New Horizons can't take pictures and send them to us at the same time, so imaging activity is interspersed with downlinks to Earth to transmit data. Emily Lakdawalla has posted a downlink schedule. On Wednesday afternoon (ET), the probe will transmit three images of Pluto that were taken from 77,000km away, with a resolution of 0.4 km per pixel. They'll be the first three pieces of a mosaic of Pluto's surface, and the dwarf planet will fill all three frames. It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects. (Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system. New Horizon's measurements indicate Pluto is slightly larger than we thought. It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.)
It's larger than we thought, lets call it a planet (Score:4, Insightful)
lol, that surely won't wake up any old controversy :)
anyway, awesome to see images coming through
Re:It's larger than we thought, lets call it a pla (Score:5, Insightful)
Still say they should have named Charon, Goofy.
Re:It's larger than we thought, lets call it a pla (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
And, because this is the Internet, I'm being sarcastic.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And, because this is the Internet, I'm being sarcastic.
And moving your decimal places to the left.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
(Thank you frovingslosh for mentioning my mistake before I had time to comment myself). The dimensions I quoted are not km, but earth radii. That's what you get for copy/pasting from Wikipedia without even thinking (it should be obvious to anyone that Pluto is larger than a fraction of a km in diameter).
To be fair, it looks a lot bigger when it's excited.
Judging from the photos it was Very Happy to see New Horizons...
Re: (Score:1)
Â(it should be obvious to anyone that Pluto is larger than a fraction of a km in diameter).
Either way, that's a damn large dog.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
http://xkcd.com/1551/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Size doesn't matter if it hasn't swept out its orbit. Pluto will never sweep out its orbit.
need for delay befor the images are released (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
do you have a source? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
yep, used to take NASA minutes to redact the alien bases out of the pics. But with all those conspiracy nuts nitpicking over a few artifacts in the pics they have to be much more thorough..
Re: (Score:2)
I blame my 1200 Baud modem.
Re: (Score:1)
Beats Comcast still.
NASA's amazing capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA's staff does amazing things and this is another one. Imagine what they could do with adequate funding, non-politicized leadership, and freedom from overwhelming bureaucracy. It's a huge credit to the staff that despite enormous obstacles they do a lot of great science.
Re: (Score:1)
The occupation of Iraq was costing something like $8 billion per day. If we cut that entirely, we could fund NASA forever and have enough money left over to cure cancer and AIDS in the next five years.
Re: NASA's amazing capabilities (Score:2)
But who needs a cure?
Re: (Score:2)
What, and cut off Big Pharma's revenue stream for palliative drugs?
(I'm not sure whether I'm joking or not.)
Re: (Score:3)
Or just one day of funding to the illegal aliens with free stuff.
well obviously you have absolutely no clue how much we actually spend on that.
Re: (Score:2)
"That would be 0% administrative fees (except for NASA overhead, of course)"
Which runs, what? 99.99% or so?
Not completely kidding here .....
Re: (Score:1)
I wonder how much funding an equivalent organization which didn't belong to any nation would get if it was entirely funded by donations from all over the world? I'm not American so I couldn't pay NASA if I wanted to and I'm not sure I'd want to if I could due to the military applications of a lot of the technology they develop. However, if a purely international space exploration organization, which was clearly not tied to any nation existed, I would donate to it and I'm sure many others all over the world
After 5:00 AM EDT (Score:5, Informative)
The first data download with pictures from the encounter (the "New York TImes" download) will start at 5:00 AM EDT Wednesday. Expect some in the morning, and a lot during the 3:00 PM EDT NASA Press Conference.
Re: (Score:3)
The vehicles you refer to on Earth are autonomous, rather than being remotely piloted. Because of latency, all rovers on other planets have to be at least somewhat autonomous. Teleoperator control is only possible on the Moon, and barely.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you mean to say Mars, rather than Earth?
Re: (Score:2)
I mean in both places the parent cited.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember Sputnik and having a hard time understanding how it stayed up there. I still haven't lost my sense of wonder at all of the marvelous things we've done, seen and learned in my lifetime.
largest already (Score:5, Informative)
,
It's now considered the largest of the Kuiper Belt objects.
It already was considered that. Eris, the previous contender for largest dwarf planet, has not been considered a Kuiper Belt Object for a long time now, but a Scattered Disk Object.
Life in 'MURICA (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
strap giant rockets on pluto and smash it into Venus ala Planetary Annihilation.
Re: (Score:1)
Bonus points if we knock it into the Sun and apply top-right English to make Pluto follow it.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny, cause the US funds some of the LHC as well. There was no reason to duplicate the work anyways.
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/... [web.cern.ch]
Control room as status reports came in (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
There's no "redo" in this mission, and the probe could have encountered local particles where a sand-sized grain could have killed the probe during its dive past Pluto, perhaps part of a thin or ex-ring. There was a lot to be worried about during that "silent" main encounter.
It's kind of like sending your kid to college, but not hearing anything from or about him/her until her final report card comes in the mail.
Downlink (Score:5, Informative)
Reminds me of the early 1990s when JPEG images first started showing up. Full-color 640x480 GIF photo scans were a couple hundred kB and could take 10+ minutes to download over my 2400 baud modem. I was astounded that a 30-40 kB JPEG could look just as good to the eye. Course the JPEG took over half a minute to decode and display back then, but combined with download time it was still faster. (Yes computers and network speeds used to be that slow - it's why the early web made extensive use of thumbnail pics.)
Re:Downlink (Score:5, Informative)
Downlink speed is limited to 1 kbps (bits, not bytes) [planetary.org]. 2 kbps if they use a trick involving shutting down power to instruments to boost transmit power.
That's actually a dual polarization mode - this is the first spacecraft with a dual-polarization data transmit capability. (And, yes, it does require more power, and so won't be used until they are well past Pluto and can put things on standby.) Even with that, it will take 16 months to get all of the data back.
Re: (Score:2)
Back then I often used the browser's "switch graphics off" option for most sites since I didn't come to the Web for pics...well okay...maybe a tad of porn.
It's hard to switch graphics off in newer browsers. It's deeper in the menu tree or a plug-in.
I want that feature back for mobile devices, because they often either have 1990's speeds and/or have expensive bytes.
Re: (Score:1)
"Remember when the internet used to be this slow? Up all night and you'd see eight women" -- The IT Crowd
Re:Downlink (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Downlink (Score:5, Interesting)
In these 10 years since launch, they could have precomputed every possible picture, hash them, and then the probe could have simply sent the hashes instead of the full size pictures.
Just for fun, let's see what it would take for them to pull this off. The LORRI image sensor [planetary.org] is 1024x1024 pixels with 12 bits per pixel.
So the number of distinct images divided by the timespan available gives 2^(12*20) / (10 years) = about 5.6 * 10^63 hashes per second.
Let's say you had a CPU capable of computing one such image hash per nanosecond (very optimistic), you'd need 2^(12*20) / (10 years) / (1 nanosecond) = about 5.6 * 10^54 CPUs to pull this off.
For comparison [fnal.gov] that's an order of magnitude or so more than the number of nucleons in our earth.
If those CPUs consumed 50W of power computing these hashes (again very optimistic), the entire project would consume 2^(12*20) / (1 nanosecond) * (50 watt) = 8.8 * 10^64 joules.
For reference [wikipedia.org] that's two orders of magnitude more than the total mass-energy (including dark matter) of the Virgo supercluster, the supercluster which contains our Milky Way galaxy.
Unless I messed up the calculations that is...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Although it's an intentionally ridiculous proposal, I imagine some amount of collisions could be tolerated, as one could simply view the image to determine if it's a picture of a planet to deconflict.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
There are two potential Kuiper-belt objects the probe could explore, based on remaining propellant. Both are rather small, though.
I've read the power system will hold out until about 2030, although some instruments may not function very well before that with lower power.
Re: (Score:3)
The spacecraft is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectic generator (RTG), but that's not a reactor. The power comes from heat produced by the decay of Plutonium, but there is no sustained nuclear chain reaction involved.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless New Horizons is going to swing back around and come back to the center of the Solar System, NH is well beyond the asteroid belt and won't be able to take any pictures of it in the future.
New Horizons acronym? (Score:1)
NASA usually has screw-ball acronyms for probe and instrument names. Does "New Horizons" have one?
Non-Earth-Wayward-Historical-Oort-Reaching-(and)-Identifying-Zenith-Oriented-NASA-System or the like? Give 5 pts. to the best guess...
(Mine probably won't pass, I know)
Re: (Score:2)
Only if you can't find a way to pronounce "nh." I'm pretty sure that's the first thing I say every morning when I wake up.
Why are we doing this? (Score:3)
I love cool probe taking pictures of distant planets (or whatever pluto is called these days). But why are we doing this? Just because we can? For the pleasure of exploring? Or is the exploration of pluto key in understanding some phenomena?
Re: (Score:2)
Our solar system consists of 3 classes of objects: rocky planets, gas giants, dwarf bodies. Going to Pluto allows us to study the 3rd class. Scientists think these dwarf objects in the Kuiper Belt are the building blocks of planets but did not have a chance to accumulate into one since our solar system formed and studying objects in that area will give us a more complete understanding of what happened during the early age of our solar system.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Pluto/... [jhuapl.edu]
I think this mission is especiall
Re: (Score:1)
Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects are the left overs from the formation of the solar system.. the raw ingredients.
This mission is planning on gaining great insights into formation of planetary systems, primarily our own but it should help modeling others..
also Pluto will be almost twice as far away from us within the next century, this was really the last feasible attempt to get a chance to explore it in a reasonable time (9 years)... its got a 248 year elongated orbit, pluto has barely completed 1/3rd of
Re: (Score:2)
The exploration of Pluto is key in understanding the phenomenon of the solar system.
I was really excited about this (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd been waiting for this and following New Horizons so obviously it's great to see, but what slightly tainted the coverage for me was all the freaking USA flag-wavin'. Do you guys really always have to do that? Obama called it "American leadership". Look, I know it was launched and managed by NASA but it involved various non-US technology and experts, not to mention plenty of non-US interest (and non-interest from most US citizens who won't even have heard of New Horizons until yesterday).
I do think your nationalism ruins things a bit. At one point a NASA guy said it was "all about America" in a room full of US flags. Funny, I thought it was all about Pluto. Can't it just be a victory for human ingenuity and curiosity?
Re: (Score:1)
No, we did it and will take credit for it. Thanks.
Re: (Score:3)
If you look at the history of the launch vehicle used for New Horizons, the Atlas V, there wasn't all that much German content in it. The "German rocket meme" applied strongly to the Saturn series of rockets developed almost in a linear progression from the V-2 by von Braun's group in Huntsville. But while von Braun was working for the Army and later NASA in Huntsville, the Air Force was developing the Atlas and Titan rockets independently of the Germans. And a few decades further back, Robert Goddard de
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the technology was american.
Most of the non-american technology was developed mostly with american technology.
Most to almost all of the cost was covered by US Taxpayers.
I think that the US flag waving is fair. But I agree that's a victory for humanity. I guess I'd call it "American leadership" too..
Re:I was really excited about this (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact the core technology of the 2 main imaging devices, LORRI and RALPH, was British [eadt.co.uk].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Without the nationalism and pride behind the space race in the 60's we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today. And just like we europeans cheerfully pat ourselves on the back for the Rosetta and other achievements, USA has now won the race to send robots to all the planets. That _is_ something to take pride in, and they can celebrate in every way they want. Congratulations!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
There's also an American flag on the Moon. Get over it and enjoy the science.
The flag(s) on the moon bother me a whole lot less (Score:2)
than the fact that Richard Nixon is the only US President to have his name on the moon (inscribed on the plaques attached to the LM descent stages). No mention of the 3 preceding presidents who actually created NASA and started the push toward the moon. Just tricky Dick, who wasted no time in KILLING the Apollo program shortly thereafter.
On the bright side, those flags are surely bleached white and crumbled from all the UV radiation and thermal cycles they have seen over the last few decades. And the one le
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd been waiting for this and following New Horizons so obviously it's great to see, but what slightly tainted the coverage for me was all the freaking USA flag-wavin'. Do you guys really always have to do that?
We American Scientists do things like that because the number of politicians and voters who are for nationaldickwaving is much larger than the number of politicians and voters who are for science. We don't like the national dickwaving, but sometimes we just have to take one for the team.
Obama called it "American leadership".
If Obama had not said something along those lines, the American news media's coverage would have been dominated by Republican Presidential candidates attacking Obama's lack of patriotism.
At one point a NASA guy said it was "all about America" in a room full of US flags. Funny, I thought it was all about Pluto.
By uttering those three simple words
Re: (Score:2)
Any time you have an in-group/out-group dynamic, you have to be careful that it doesn't turn into one of the many times in human history when that becomes a source of unspeakable pain and suffering. Snubbing the contributions of other nations in the control room paid for by American taxpayers by employees whose paychecks are paid by American taxpayers is not really comparable to, say, African colonization or the First World War. Maybe you can hope that humans stop seeing some people as part of their group a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Except for the Europeans, has any country had a significant space mission success without a burst of nationalist self-congratulation? The Russians do it, the Chinese do it, the Indians do it. Europe/ESA is the anomaly here. At this time in human history nationalism remains a strong motivator for national achievements (good and bad). And as someone pointed out before me, nationalism opens up the public budgets for missions like this. I'll turn your question around, without knowing if you are European or
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Title capitalization need to die! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure. Maybe (and I'm guessing here) because the title of an article could be considered the article's name, and the English language capitalizes names.
Just a guess. A quick Google search gave me the various rules for capitalizing words in titles, but not the origin of the practice.
Re: (Score:2)
Goodness I'll never understand why in english all the first letter in an article title sentence are capitalized. I was reading the title and kept wondering why the heck Horizons new phones were "home" after the Pluto flyby.
Changes in capitalization would not fix your problem. "Phones" can be a noun or verb, whether the P is capital or lower case. The real problem is that titles frequently use ambiguous wording.
P.S. It is customary to capitalize "English".
Re: (Score:2)
We heart you too, Pluto (Score:2)
N/T
We need to teach these folks about English syntax (Score:3)
Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system.
Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco. ;-)
The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.
Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)
Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.
In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.
Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly. ;-)
Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.
In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.
16 months? (Score:2)
"It will take a full 16 months for New Horizons to transmit all the data it collects."
What, does NASA use Comcast?