NASA's new pictures and flyby from Pluto July 14, 2015

July 13, 2014: Here's the NASA countdown clock for its New Horizons mission to Pluto: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

Am excited to see the closeup pictures start arriving, starting tomorrow.

It reminds me of Voyager, although not, I think, as exciting.

I'm pleased, however, to discover that Pluto is definitively larger than Eris.

Kind of a long wait for the information to be processed. I "tuned in" to the "live broadcast" at NASA and all that has happened is the satellite turning around pointing back towards earth and giving an "everything ok" - now it has pointed back towards Pluto and is engorging data. The guy said it would be some time before all the info is transmitted back to earth.

Here is a link through Space.com to the live streaming analysis of what is going on. NASA web site has no links I can find to the event - weird, you have to wade thru the ads in space.com.

http://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html

Aha, one of the first infrared images has been processed !!!! ;-)



{doubt I am the first person to think of this}

I was on the team that designed, built and launched New Horizons (since moved on to another project called Solar Probe Plus). It's been really exciting and fulfilling to see the results of what we did almost a decade ago. APL, the lab at Johns Hopkins University where I work, and where the mission is run, has been an absolute mad house!

The reason we won't get data back quickly is that we run a 12 Watt radio transmitter back to Earth - so the data rate is really crappy. Plus we're getting a boatload of data back. So it'll take almost a year and a half to get everything down. In the meantime, we'll be heading to another Kuiper a Belt object.

By the way, I found this in a NY Times article. Check out what some of the new features on Pluti have been named...

A large splotch that resembles a whale was named Cthulu, a deity from a H. P. Lovecraft story. Other splotch names included Meng-Po, the goddess of forgetfulness in Chinese mythology; Balrog, a creature in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books; and Vucub Came and Hun Came, death gods of Mayan myth.

Wow.

Tell us more! What did you do, exactly?

What's the next object?

XKCD got it right:

>7 drneutron: We've been able to attend lectures by two NASA scientists this year. I've been really impressed both by their enthusiasm and by their abilities as speakers. They were also very good at handling audience questions, taking special care with enthusiastic children. The more recent one was a woman who got into Hubble straight out of university. I'm sure the little boy she spoke to is determined to follow her example. (He had obviously dragged his father and two younger sisters along.)

I suppose NASA takes care to send only those who really can speak to international conferences and connected public appearances, but they are good ambassadors for the whole organization. BTW if one of these lectures is on in your area, GO!

The data rate is 1kbit to 4kbit. Slower than the 56k modem.

>8 timspalding: I was the System Assurance Manager for the mission from 2003 through launch and early operations in 2006. My job was to make sure the spacecraft did what it was supposed to do, so I led a lot of anomaly resolution and problem solving work, spent time with NASA folks going over system test results and the like. Plus I got to spend lots of time in the integration and test cleanroom, and was on console down in Florida for the launch.

Since late 2007, I've been leading the technical team for the Solar Probe Plus as Mission System Engineer, a fancy title for chief engineer. So I'll have another one launched in 2018 - this time to touch the Sun (multiple flights through the corona).

Yeah, that xkcd cartoon was pretty popular around here yesterday. Especially the Debate Hole. :)

>9 MarthaJeanne: Alan Stern, the principle investigator is really good at giving these sorts of talks, and has gathered folks around the mission who are really good at it too! I had a chance to do some of the public relations work back around launch time - I worked with science teachers to develop curriculum about the engineering of the mission and gave a few talks to technical and non-technical groups. My favorite was when I visited the school where my sister teaches in rural Louisiana, a K-12 school with not much in the way of science and technology resources. I got to talk to elementary grades and high school juniors/seniors, and both were just as fascinated with the mission and the launch! At least one kid is now in a technical degree program at college.

>10 vy0123: Yup. The main reason the transmitter's so low power is that we get power from a radioisotope thermal generator, which is only 6% efficient or so. So to keep the mass down, we only flew a limited amount of radioactive material and produced a limited amount of power, and are living with the low data rate. We have time while we're flying to the next object to get all the data down. The whole mission operates on less than 3 100W lightbulbs worth of power.

>11 drneutron: The whole mission operates on less than 3 100W lightbulbs worth of power.

I suppose you don't have a problem with power on your solar probe, or do solar cells burn up while going through the corona?

>7 drneutron: Thanks for posting again in the science area. I have a question about your current project the Solar Probe Plus {link to Probe website}, prompted by the recent articles postulating a "mini ice age" because of extremely low sunspot activity. Will the Probe be measuring either of the magnetic fields mentioned in Prof Valentina Zharkova's research? {quoted below}

“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time. Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,” said Zharkova.



Link to article in Royal Astronomical Society web site.

>12 jjwilson61: We developed cells that can operate at high temperature and illumination conditions. But they have to be water cooled to control the temperature, so we also developed a substrate for the solar cells that incorporates a pumped water cooling system. The cells generate something like 13 W of thermal power for every watt of electrical power.

>13 DugsBooks: We'll measure vector DC magnetic fields using one magnetometer and AC vector magnetic field up to about 20 MHz using another. These are point measurement made along our trajectory, so we won't have spatial maps of the fields. But we will have a time history since our trajectory repeats for a 7 year period, covering most of a solar cycle. These measurements are designed to look for mechanisms and features in the field structure that can accelerate charged particles and plasma to make the solar wind.

Variations in mag field with an 11 year period will look DC to us in a small time-scale sense, but over the full life of the mission we should see any variations that occur. I think that will help understand the source of the solar cycle, but probably isn't definitive.

>7 drneutron:: A large splotch that resembles a whale was named Cthulu, a deity from a H. P. Lovecraft story. Other splotch names included Meng-Po, the goddess of forgetfulness in Chinese mythology; Balrog, a creature in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books; and Vucub Came and Hun Came, death gods of Mayan myth.

Cthulu and Balrog? So do NASA, the International Astronomical Union or whoever mix "real" mythologies with honest-to-goodness fictional mythologies?

Also, various sites like Wikipedia and GodChecker use the present tense for Meng-Po, suggesting that she is a 'live' god, in that she still has believers. So it's not just safely 'dead' deities/mythical creatures like Io, Ceres and Charon either? 'Live' gods are fair game as well?

Can we hope to see Om (Small gods), Yahweh (KJV) and Fluffy (Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone) sharing a Kuiper Belt object any time soon?

>15 Cynfelyn: The way I understand it is that the science community (IAU, I think) decided on major themes for features on Pluto and each of the moons, along with candidate lists of names. The theme for Pluto was names related to "real" and fictional underworlds. That's not been done too much in the past, but the need for names is big enough that they're expanding what they'll consider. Names get nominated and screened, so there's some thought to not being offensive, if possible, and I suspect Yahweh wouldn't be used. Fluffy? Maybe so if that name gets nominated and it fits the general theme.

Interesting article on topic "Space.com recently sat down with New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute here in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss the historic mission and what lies ahead"

NASA web site for New Horizons
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

Link to info on New Horizons next target - far Kupier belt object
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20151026b

Twitter feed for New Horizions - neat stuff
https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons