A difference image, stretched a little more than 16x:
Click to view attachment

first regarding alk3997:
Determining the brightness fluctuations from this distance is mainly a matter of statistics. So besides the distance it depends on the number of images taken, and to some degree on time intervals between images with respect to the rotation or oscillation period of the moons.
And introductory question would be:
- What's the relative amplitude and frequency of the brightness oscillations of the moons?

From the S/N of the images one could then derive the number of the samples needed for a given confidence level.
(Just my preliminary answer.)

Thanks!
I've explained part of it in an above post.
In this case there are eight sets of sets of six images.
First I've summed up all images within each set separately (or five of the six images of the set), with some bias, to get a background near black, the raw images within the set are already well-registered; the sum at each pixel position skips the summand with the largest deviation to get the image cleaned from point noise and CRs. Then the resulting eight summed images are registered to subpixel accuracy (up to about 0.004 pixels, with a lot of number crunching), magnified by bilinear interpolation, and averaged, summed or median-filtered to extract as much of the fainter information as possible from the set of 48 images into one image.

Then repeat it with another set of e.g. 48 images, taken at a significantly different time, e.g. another day. The result are two "reduced" images, ready for the blink gif, or for differencing.

You don't need to be very close for lightcurve work- we've been tracking Nix and Hydra brightnesses for a couple of months now. The data get better as we get closer, though.

John

John and Gerald, Thanks!

Andy

From the press releases i'm not entirely sure: Has the albedo estimate for Kerberos been adjusted downwards? The "5% of Nix and Hydra" in the Wired article linked above would suggest so - dramatically. ("as black as coal" isn't a very exact estimate either )

If the albedo estimate has been adjusted downwards - is there a new size estimate?

Yes. See the actual paper.
http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2015/24/pdf.pdf

A first overview of cleaned and stacked 4x4 binned LORRI images with a little less than 3 seconds exposure time, in the OpNav Campaign 4 style, but "untitled", taken from 2015-05-31 to 2015-06-02:
Click to view attachment
Some of the images may be motion-blurred a bit.

... there have been released other images as well, but "con algo hay que empezar".

Reduction to 3-fold magnifiction and gif animation of the registerd versions of the above series leads to significant loss of information, but Nix and Hydra can nevertheless be perceived:

Album of the 7 individual frames (PNG format), the gif has been composed of.

Non-binned images between 29 May and 5 June, Pluto-centric, no extra processing:

Click to view attachment

we really need a new official deconvoluted release!

impressive, features on Pluto are now clearly visible even with modest processing (just tweaked the contrast and zoomed 4x without interpolation)

... For completeness, the differenced "untitled" 4x4 binned sequence, showing at least Nix and Hydra:
Click to view attachment

The three latest 1x1-binned frames (taken within 30 seconds, after system time 0295786798) cropped, heavily sharpened, and animated:
Click to view attachment
Features on Pluto look reproducible, enhanced Charon features look like random noise/artifacts. But I'm almost sure, that at least with lossless images we may see first Charon features soon.

^ Those aren't even the latest images any more, we just got today's images.

Click to view attachment

Pluto looks like a wannabe Iapetus from this angle (cropped, unprocessed).

Thanks for sharing!

In case anyone's interested, this is a plot of New Horizon's trajectory through the Pluto system. I produced it with a couple of New Horizons mission team members, so all the data you find here is 100% reliable/verified. The visual representation obviously isn't realistic, as I had to enlarge each body to make it visible and tweak a few other things, however it shold be pretty good unless you actually had to drive through the Pluto system.

Click to view attachment

"In case anyone's interested..." I'm sure everyone here is interested, and wants to be prepared.


Those new "footprints" of 2015-06-05 look promising already,
Click to view attachment
although the sets I've used here haven't yet been complete:

The two series have been taken on the same day, the second one about 14 hours later than the first one.

This is a merged set of Gerald's three frames from his animation. Getting closer!

Phil

Click to view attachment

I have a question: what are the occultation times? occultation beginning, occultation end or what else?
it would be great if you could give the time of both the beginning and end of the occultation

Ciao, I believe that the times the New Horizons team gave me for the occultations are the times when the sun sets over Pluto and Charon. For example, from what I understood, solar ingress at Pluto is from 12:16 to 12:49, and the sun is expected to set at about 12:51:25, which is the time I reported. I'm not 100% sure so I might ask, however what I said should be at least vaguely correct, maybe the solar ingress times have changed a bit.

Also, just as a side node, New Horizons will also observe a third "solar" occultation starting about 4 hours after closest apporach, when Pluto will obscure a bright UV star.

Meraviglioso. This is very impressive and useful.

Does that mean that at closest approach Pluto will be bathed with the evening sun or just from the position where NH will be ?

Since, NH will be coming from the Sunward side, initially it will be see Pluto in sunlight [ close to noon ]. As it passes Pluto, it will see
Pluto as a crescent. How many cameras are on board ? Can NH take pictures of Charon while also taking Pluto's ?

[ADMIN: Please help us avoid forum redundancy and clutter. These are the kinds of questions that can EASILY be answered with a Google search or by checking the NH web site.]

Indeed NH is on the sunward side right now with the images we're receiving and will continue to be on this side up until near closest approach. It might be interesting to see an ephemeris of Pluto as seen from NH including phase angle and sub-spacecraft latitude and longitude, if anyone has one handy?

Thanks!



The main camera is Ralph, which is tasked with taking the very high res maps. Ralph consists of two components, MVIC (3 panchromatic and 4 color imagers) and LEISA (an infrared spectrometer). MVIC operates over the bandpass from 0.4 to 0.95 microns. Ralph has 7 CCDs, plus 1 infrared array detector.

The camera being used right now to take almost 100% of the images returned so far is LORRI, a panchromatic high-magnification imager, consisting of a telescope with an 8.2-inch (20.8-centimeter) aperture that focuses visible light onto a CCD.

If I recall correctly, New Horizons has enough power to gather data with 5 instruments simultaneously. If you're interested in seeing the sequence of the scientific operations, I suggest you take a look at NASA's Eyes on the Solar System. Or, if you're just interested in the observations, then this is a great PDF:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/The-Path-t..._LORRI-MVIC.pdf

Thanks.

This is the most excited I have been about a space mission - probably because of the time it has taken.
But most certainly, this will be the only time in my lifetime [ and I am very optimistic person ]
we will have been that close to Pluto.

I wish we could have orbited but I appreciate NH will be travelling far too quickly for that.

By the way, did we know where Charon would be [ in relation to Pluto ] in 2006 ?

OK, so you are planning the encounter trajectory. You must maximise the chances of passing through intact so rings are an issue. And you want the Earth and Sun occultations for Pluto and Charon for radio/atmospheric science. And there is no point getting too close because everything will be a blur. And blowing through at 50, 000km/h you can't afford to spend too much time rotating.
All in all you want the moons all on one side of Pluto, and take NH by on the other side at a sensible distance.

Is Pluto's gravity strong enough to make the occultations work whichever side you go, or is it built in to the heliocentric trajectory?

Click to view attachment

So this bit confused me. I've never come across this particular graphic with an error zone. Does it infer the remote possibility that we may capture nearly nothing should Pluto be in the upper right most portion? I'm not the least bit worried but that zone seems rather large.

Giving it more thought, aided by a beer, it is obvious that NH must pass to the East, "in front of" Pluto, and have Pluto's orbital motion (3-4 km/s) bring it into line behind NH. And the spacecraft will have to move in the Pluto-Charon-Earth/Sun plane to get the occultations.

I did end up finding a recording of the June 3rd press conference, so I thought I'd contribute by sharing.

First, here is a Youtube recording of the telecon. It has the telecon audio, and the slides as video, but the motion video is not playing. In other words, when they offered an animation, all you see here is the first frame:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKPMYkgi-tY

(side note: if anyone here has a Youtube account, please thank that user, Matthew Travis, for recording and posting it!)

Second, here's the briefing materials, with working animations:

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/briefi...f-pluto-s-moons

So, listen to the Youtube video's audio, while looking at the briefing materials.

Finally, for completeness ...

The error ellipse has to do with uncertainty in Pluto's orbital position -- because we haven't tracked it over a full orbit, the uncertainty in its path is more than we're used to for planets, moons, and asteroids. Optical navigation images being taken now will help to reduce the uncertainty, and they'll be able to update parameters close to encounter to accommodate better positional predictions, but they've had to plan the whole encounter with the best orbital predictions we have, and yes, that error zone captures the level of uncertainty. Like any error ellipse, though, Pluto is more likely to be in the middle of the zone than at the edge.

The best images so far keep reminding me of what Titan looked like in pre-Cassini imagery, although there's not much chance that the dark areas on Pluto have the same origin as on Titan (e.g., sand dunes).

This is starting to get good.

Some of us have lived through the first spacecraft reconnaissance of Venus, the Galileans, etc. All of us for Titan, some of us for Mars. But this is it. This is almost certainly the last time that a world of this size will be visited for the first time by spacecraft in our lifetimes, barring the unlikely event of a blazing-fast trajectory to Eris.

Savor the moment. It won't come again.

It is getting good!

But I expect some of us can remember when the far side of the Moon was the frontier of exploration.


Phil

An update of the 2015-06-05 "footprint" images, with 6x9, 8x9, and 8x9 images, total exposure times a little less than 9, 12, and 12 minutes respectively:


Animation of three stacked images:

Preliminary differences 4-fold stretched, animated:

There are probably ways to improve the latter numerically, since I've been storing the stacked files with 8-bit channels.

No, it means the right edge of Pluto could be on the right of the ellipse, so you'd still get the data, the downside is the extra images take up space on the data recorder, but it's a trade off to make sure you get the data needed. Also it accommodates any slight errors in pointing by the spacecraft, but the spacecraft pointing has as far as I know been excellent, as you'd expect with such a good team.

My impression was the flyby sequence was loaded way back in 2009, and won't be changed, except to fill in gaps that were deliberately left to accommodate imaging new moons.

The flyby sequence was finalized after the 2012 spacecraft rehearsal. No additions are allowed. The only changes are to fill in blanks like DSN schedules we did not know in 2012. Better is the Enemy of Good Enough, we prefer 80% of something to 100% of nothing-- we're not taking risks just to do a little better.

Alan, is there a doc you can point to, or much you can say (without spending too much of your very valuable time!) about how fault protection is going to be handled during the period around close approach? I'd assume there is some sort of inhibition against entering safe mode for most possible faults, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Thanks!

Pluto and Charon in raw images from 5-8 June:


Click to view attachment


Click to view attachment

Here's an enlarged version for Charon for 5-7 June:

Click to view attachment

I guess we might be seeing hints of surface variation on Charon in the raw images (edit: after posting this, I realised comparing frames taken seconds/similar between them would be a good way to check the noise levels..).

Very good! I split the Pluto gif into its four frames and processed them to bring out more detail. Not a real deconvolution, but playing with histograms in multiple layers.

Phil

Click to view attachment

So I applied some light LR-deconvolution to your processed frames Phil.

Click to view attachment

NH is approaching Pluto with one of the poles somewhat facing us correct? Maybe I'm too excited and hopeful here, but those look and behave like atmospheric structures, like clouds.

Edit: Also before this blows up, grain of salt here. Deconvolution can sometimes add strange artifacts. We are still too far away for it to provide entirely reliable information.

Edit 2: Went back and made a few modification to settings to lighten up the impact of the process. The right animation used maximum entropy followed by a Lucy Richardson process.

Click to view attachment
Click to animate

Correct. Encounter Mode (P-7 to P=2) locks out safe hold. See papers on NH "Autonomy" system in AIAA and IEEE proceedings by Bauer et al.

My wild guess regarding the dark areas within the bright areas..I believe we could be seeing first signs of sublimation of ice!

Here are two versions of an image that is a stack of four images obtained 15 seconds apart on June 6 at a range of 45.8 million km. Here they have been enlarged by a factor of four.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

I used these images:

lor_0295859743_0x630_sci_1.jpg
lor_0295859728_0x630_sci_3.jpg
lor_0295859713_0x630_sci_3.jpg
lor_0295859698_0x630_sci_3.jpg

The left version is the stack without any processing so it should show correct relative brightness. The right version has been sharpened using RegiStax. The sharpened version reveals a diagonal dark band on Pluto - it's now absolutely certain that this is a real feature. In contrast, the apparently brighter terrain at the right limb is almost certainly a processing artifact. Charon may be starting to show large scale markings, i.e. possibly very slightly darker terrain in its upper left 'quadrant'. But this could easily be an image processing artifact.

The left version can be used to make crude brightness estimates. Using 1 for Pluto's brightest terrain, Charon's surface is ~0.5, the brightness of Pluto's dark 'band' is ~0.9 (not very accurate) and the darkest terrain is ~0.25 to 0.3. The dark terrain is rather close to the limb so 0.25-0.3 isn't very accurate but nevertheless this seems to indicate that even though Pluto has large albedo variations, the contrast is probably significantly less than on Iapetus.

It wouldn't surprise me if small dark spots started appearing within the bright terrain at much higher resolution and/or small bright spots started appearing within the dark terrain.


This seems very plausible. Also one crazy idea is that some of the dark terrain could be associated with activity of some kind, maybe like Triton's dark geysers, but it's rather early to start speculation about that. But things are starting to get really exciting now that the images are clearly better than the best HST images.

This is a stacked and heavily sharpened (before and after stacking) version of three 2015-06-09 Pluto/Charon images:
Click to view attachment
I'm very skeptical about this strong sharpening. So we may see anything from processing artifacts to a giant storm on Pluto. Charon is going to show reproducible features.

Edit: Color-encoded brightness of stacked image without sharpening, to offer an alternative view:
Click to view attachment
There is a clear asymmetry of the brightness, but interpretation is partly suggested by processing.

The intense ring around Pluto looks like over-sharpening to me. There is information in these images, but so little that it's easy to destroy with overzealous processing.

This is a "faked" image as comparison, starting with no relevant features, and similar sharpening:
Click to view attachment
It's rather rotational symmetric. So deviation from the rotational symmetry in the processed original images hint towards real features. But besides the optical PSF there is an additional risk of enhancing jpg artifacts, since the processed Pluto image is a composite of only three jpg-compressed images.

Heres a processed version of 'lor_0296134018_0x630_sci_1' from yesterday.

Click to view attachment

Max entropy deconvolution and some histogram functions.

My version of the June 9th images, the three LORRI images merged. A bright right edge on Pluto itself is an artifact of my appallingly ad-hoc processing method.

Phil

Click to view attachment

New images taken today!
Click to view attachment

Edit: Sorry, I forgot to add the original source: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounte...sure=100%20msec

It's very interesting to see the image together with the diagram showing the image orientation. It's starting to look as if Pluto has a bright polar cap, a somewhat darker collar around the bright polar areas and then brighter terrain in the equatorial areas - not as bright as the polar terrain though.

Close inspection of the original, unprocessed image seems to imply that the poleward (northern) edge of the collar might be more subtle and less sharply defined than the southern edge (the edge closer to the equator).

Edit: Of course other images show that *if* there is a darker collar around the bright polar terrain its extent to the south is probably nonuniform and varies with longitude.