New Horizons: Pre-launch, launch and main cruise, Pluto and the Kuiper belt Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Pluto is known to have rather big albedo variations across its surface so this is going to be interesting to see.

For fun I did some extremely crude 'measurements' in this new image by summing the brightness of the Pluto and Charon pixels. The brightness ratio I get is very roughly consistent with what their different sizes should imply. Of course this ignores possible albedo effects, Pluto is overexposed in these versions of the image and I don't know how it has been processed (and I'm finding it difficult to wait for the images we'll see in 2015!).

[nprev]

And we always will. We haven't even figured out Earth completely yet, and we live here.

[Astro0]

Just 730 days to go until New Horizons closest approach.
Yes folks, that's just two years from today!
Where did the last 7.5 years go?

[nprev]

Funny how that happens, isn't it?

But, yes: Remember watching the launch with great excitement. Two more years to go.

[Explorer1]

Alan Stern's webcast starting soon: pre-program mentions UMSF and the Kodak moments in this thread!

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20130722.php

[nprev]

Do you have a direct link to the pre-program, or is this a paper document?

[Explorer1]

I just opened the stream 10-15 minutes early. It was pretty quick, a few screenshots with the old logo and some of the final pictures (Europa rise, etc).
Most of the rest was just a standard layman's intro to the mission until Alan's talk. He said that discussing the Jupiter flyby in detail could be a whole other talk, so he touched pretty lightly on it for time reasons (though there was enough to show the Tvashtar eruption).

[Explorer1]

This article from Aviation Week mentions that "maps of frost on Pluto's far side are possible."

By far side, does they mean the currently unlit hemisphere? I was under the impression that the situation is similar to that of Voyager 2 at Uranus, with around half the surface remaining unmapped.

[Jaro_in_Montreal]

Stern said something about the far side of Pluto being lit by reflection from Charon - although the configuration doesn't look very favorable at close encounter....

[Alan Stern]

Stern said something about the far side of Pluto being lit by reflection from Charon - although the configuration doesn't look very favorable at close encounter....

We're conducting the flyby when Charon is positioned to illuminate the so-called "far side" hemisphere, which is the terrain opposite the close approach hemisphere. This includes both night side terrains and some polar terrains now in winter darkness--i.e., terrains that do not see sun for decades.

We will have to spatially bin these images heavily to get the SNR we need, so the spatial resolution will be crude. And there are issues of both SNR and scattered light that will make the data reduction very tough. But the end result--if this works--will be albedo maps of these terrains that allow us to look for diurnal and polar winter frost deposition and which may in reveal a few large scale features we would not otherwise see.

[john_s]

To elaborate a bit, we make these observations well after closest approach, when we're looking back at the night side, which will be roughly half-illuminated (feebly) by Charon. We'll make two attempts, one about half an hour after closest approach, with MVIC (our wide-angle camera), and the second about 12 hours later with our narrow-angle camera, LORRI. Then for good measure we'll look at the night side of Charon in Pluto-shine a couple of days later. But like Alan says, don't expect the results to be pretty.

John

[Explorer1]

Thanks for the replies. This is basically the same technique Cassini uses with Saturnshine; only the Sun is much farther and Charon is much smaller and dimmer.

[djellison]

However - from Pluto- Charon takes up quite a lot of the sky - so Charon shine is brighter than you might at first imagine.

[jasedm]

which may [in] reveal a few large scale features we would not otherwise see.

Perhaps comparable to the dark-side imaging Voyager achieved (and Phil Stooke and others processed) for Ariel and Titania at Uranus?

[Alan Stern]

FYI UMSF fans!

Pluto Science Conference Exceeds Expectations: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20130801.php