New Horizon's distance from Pluto drops below 500 million km today. The main thread here has been active since before launch and until today.

Today is an appropriate day for a new thread and there are also less than 14 months until Pluto arrival (time flies!). The coming months will see more spacecraft activity than in recent years with optical navigation images of Pluto/Charon, images of Neptune etc.

The next 14 months are going to be interesting to say the least.

Interesting is an understatement. This is going to be a fun year. To think, in July 2015 we'll be the first humans to ever see Pluto.

Yes, and to think, 2014 is the last year when no one knows what Pluto and it's satellites really look like.

I was looking at Yaohua2000's website yesterday and noted the distance was nearly down to 500. Time flies when your having fun.

Mr. Stern, I would like to thank you so much for New Horizons. What you and your team have done and are doing, it's a privilege to see what amazing will come of this.

Thank you,
James Sontag

I am eagerly waiting to update my two textures for Pluto and Charon

Thank you James, it's an honor for all of us on New Horizons to make this science exploration dream come true.

A question on behalf of Alan: New Horizons accomplished a trajectory correction maneuver yesterday. Someone on Twitter suggested this was the deepest-space-ever rocket burn. Is it? When/where was the last Voyager TCM?

Nice piece on our optical navigation plans, written by Emily following last week's science team mtg: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...v-campaign.html

Which reminds me, I got an answer to my question above from Twitter: The last TCMs of the Voyagers:

Voyager 1 = 1980-312/04:24 GMT after Saturn Flyby
Voyager 2 = 1989-233/15:14 GMT after Neptune Flyby

Emily- These are great numbers to have, thanks. One note, DOY=233=21 Aug so I believe the last Vgr 2 burn was just *prior* to Neptune C/A. Didn't ck on the Saturn DOY...

It's a very busy little system down to the limit of Hubble resolution, I'd be quite surprised if there aren't a number of other chunks of debris to add into the mix as these opnav campaigns proceed. Any redundancy in the obs campaign for as-yet unresolved moons/rings???

https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015/status/...4711553/photo/1

Getting ever so closer... Pluto-Charon from 400 million km away

a close up

Denoised and edited brightness.

Click to view attachment

Cleaned (by subtracting several intersects of horizontally displaced versions), cleaned 4x magnified cropped, and slightly enhanced version of the latter:
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
The small bulges at Pluto are probably remnants of noise.

Here is a press release about the radio telescope observations of Pluto & Charon using ALMA:

http://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/alma-pluto

Neat two-frame animation of the orbital motion

Movie of Charon orbiting Pluto from LORRI images covering almost 1 full rotation.
http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-...on_2014-07.html
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140807.php

Looks like a clock running backwards in time... appropriate for a spacecraft visiting never-before-seen ancient frozen worlds.

By my calculation, an observer on New Horizons will "see" Pluto at an apparent magnitude of 9.01 at the moment. It will brighten to below Mag. 9 by the end of the week with 400 million kilometers to go. (Of course you can't see an object at mag. 9 with the naked eye. It has to be Mag. 6 or less in a dark sky)

I just thought you might like that bit of trivia.

It's the 80s all over again. Just like watching Voyagers 1/2 approaching any one of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune and their moons (poetic licence sought here; the Jupiter
flybys took place in 1979).

Not long to wait until instant science time..

It really does feel like it! I remember this experience as Voyager and Triton grew larger and larger as Neptune approached (I imagine it was the same for the earlier encounters, but I wasn't old enough to follow). This seems, to tell the truth, a lot like approaching the set of moons from one of the gas giant but without the gas giant.

Edit: This should have read "as Neptune and Triton grew larger and larger as Voyager approached." Doh...

As I said in another thread, it is probably better to have this kind of encounter later in mankinds exploratory journey, so that we can not only take advantage of the better technology available on board, but also the amazing capabilities of the internet and social media, to engage those who are simply 'interested' as opposed to only those who are directly 'involved'.So that one may become the other.

Reading through the latest 'significant events' page on the Cassini website reveals that Cassini took three ISS optical navigation images of Pluto against background stars last Sunday (24th) to help with ephemeris data in pinning down Pluto's exact position for the New Horizons flyby.

IIRC this was undertaken earlier in the mission, but the data were lost due to a saving event.

It's great to see the co-operation that exists between the teams on various missions. Hopefully it helped!

There are a couple of sets of Pluto images taken over the years, but I couldn't figure out if Pluto was actually detectable in them and which "dot" among a sea of stars and noise it was.

The images in question are N00228384, N00228385 and N00228386.
It looks as though Cassini was commanded to 'stare' at Pluto so that background stars move relative to it, rather than vice-versa, as several bright stars move 'S/SW' between the frames. However there's so many cosmic ray hits/hot pixels in there, I can't obviously see the target. (I assume Pluto's position is well-enough known that it occupies the exact centre of the image)

No doubt the engineering team can clean up the images with dark frame subtraction, and pull Pluto out of the noise.

I'm amazed that Cassini's cameras are of use in this regard, given the 4 billion km range to Pluto!

I can find 56 images with target description as "SKY, PLUTO" dating back all the way to 2007, all of them are red and green filter images.

Edit: ahh, you're talking about raw images and the latest observation?

Yes, Pluto's position is well known but there are alsways some pointing errors even though Cassini's pointing is amazingly accurate and stable compared to e.g. Voyager and Galileo. But Pluto should still be close to the image center, very probably within 50 pixels from it.

Debuting today! Pluto Picture of the Day (PPOD): Daily pix from/about New Horizons, Pluto, and more! http://www.boulder.swri.edu/ppod/

Bookmark it if you like it.

-Alan

Yes, sorry Gordan, I've been looking at the latest three images from last week.

To my knowledge, the effort to aid the New Horizons mission has now involved Hubble, Cassini, Subaru, Magellan and the Canada/France Hawaii telescope. A very heartening collaborative effort to achieve the biggest 'bang for the buck' at Pluto and beyond.

And Keck. But Cassini was used for another purpose: astrometry with parallax from 10 AU.

Cassini's trajectory is similarly amazingly accurate - apparently within 90 metres of planned position during the latest Titan flyby!

Bookmarked - thanks!

Great to know we're invited along on the ride.

Those images that finally start to exceed Hubble resolution will be phenomenal - I wonder what we'll see?

When the resolution gets down to about 100 km per pixel, it might look something like the maps David Tholin, Marc Buie and Keith Horne came up with and published in this paper:

Mutual Occutation Results

Thanks to the work Tholin and others put into making those observations and deciphering the results, we already have a better look at one hemisphere of Pluto (and Charon) than Hubble can give us. I'm looking forward to seeing how well they match up to direct pictures from New Horizons. I'm expecting they'll match pretty well.

I read that Alan Stern showed an image at a recent event of New York City at the best resolution that New Horizons will achieve at Pluto. Does anyone have a link to this? My Google search failed. Thanks.

This?

An interesting and detailed report about the comments of Alan Stern about the final preparations of New Horizons.
A mission to Pluto enters the home stretch
“Beginning in May, we exceed Hubble resolution,” Stern said, a reference to the best images of Pluto taken to date. “It will get better week by week” through the July flyby.

PBS better air a "Pluto All Night" special!

Given the bit-rate from that distance, it might have to be a "Pluto All Month"...

Actually, though, that's something I'm curious about--plans for public broadcast of the encounter. Alan, have you guys developed anything detailed on this yet?

Nick- In fact, we just started that discussion today.

-Alan

Outstanding!

Suggestion: You should invite noted space journalists & bloggers to participate; there are many such in the present amateur space enthusiast community!

UMSF has been riding along with New Horizons since before she launched.
It's worth going back to page one of this thread and reading the first few posts.
In fact read back through the 110+ pages as we followed the adventure.

Thanks to Alan Stern for giving us his insights and feedback throughout the mission.

I second Nick's suggestion. Maybe there's some good value of "space science's finest communicators" (many of them to be found here) getting a chance to share that unique moment in July next year. They can do some great outreach and best of all, they're free!

Nick- We already have a plan along these lines, stay tuned as we get closer.

-Alan

I should know better than to try to teach the teacher. Great, looking very much forward to the plans; thanks, Alan!

That's going a bit far on credit, but thank you Nprev.

Is there a PPoD archive? I got here a bit late and due to my busy job might not make it every day.

(It seems like just yesterday when I had time to spend all day at my desk F5ing Where Is NH? until it crossed Lunar orbit.)

We're implementing an archive, also a subscribe (i.e., push) service. Should be just a couple of weeks now...

We got first light on Hydra in July, data only revealed it this month; story here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140912.php

A question from a layman:

New Horizons is currently in Sagittarius as viewed from the Earth, and given its relative proximity to Pluto and the relatively low gravity of the Pluto system, it seems likely from the geometry that it will continue in that direction (roughly towards the centre of the galaxy). I realise that it may be diverted to a Kuiper body object, which may change that bearing)

Given that we have a solar orbital velocity of 200km/s around the galaxy, if we superimpose New Horizon's solar-centric velocity of 14.6km/s (towards Sagittarius), does this mean that NH will very gradually spiral towards the galactic centre? - or is that a naive idea?

It will very roughly move along a Kepler ellipse around the galactic center.
But because the field of gravity of the Milky Way is poorly approximated by a mass point, instead better by a disk, the trajectory will additionally oscillate about the galactic plane.

Thank you.