I'm a bit overwhelmed. Cannot overstate congratulations to Alan and the entire New Horizons team. What an astonishing feat of technology and bold exploration!!!!

Congratulations to New Horizons!

Congratulations to the whole New Horizons team! This will go down in history, for sure. Unbelievable.

Very good job New horizons team. All systems nominal.

Absolutely, and they are going to be busy over the next 16 months. Can't wait to read the papers that come out of this epic project.

Serious congratulations! So excited and happy

"Just like we planned it. Just like we practiced." - Alice Bowman, the "MOM" of the MOC.

Congratulations NH team.

Big congratulations to the New Horizons team!

Now at last my attention can turn to looking forward to lots of hi-res images and other data in the coming days/months/year.

Congratulations and THANK YOU New Horizons team!!!!! You've made our dreams come true!

Wow, no kidding, that phase change is surprisingly energetic.

The more I think about it, the more it seems unavoidable that at some points in time, liquids are going to be (present era) acting on Pluto. Not on the surface, but rather shallowly underneath it, shallow enough to have a visible impact on the surface. You stack enough ices of nitrogen, neon, or a number of other chemicals on Pluto, at Pluto temperatures, and they're going to melt on the bottom. Not kilometers deep - as little as a dozen meters worth for nitrogen at the right temperature (which at Pluto's low gravity isn't a lot of compressive weight). Unless there's not enough gases to freeze out that thick at locations where it tends to concentrate the most, it seems pretty much a given that it would happen. And even if it didn't freeze out that thick? You'd still get ground-liquids where it gets trapped in the ground's pore space, like we get groundwater on Earth.

Even liquid water on Pluto is not unlikely - although not near the surface:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6377v1.pdf?

All the people who worked on this mission, the entire New Horizons team, congratulations. Richly deserved. Thank you for letting us see the Pluto system!

FANTASTIC...

Shows what a team of dedicated humans can accomplish...

Thank you Alan and all for this gift!

Congratulations to the NH team and praise the Lord!

Can't wait to see that first closeup pic.... When are we expected to get one?

Tomorrow, I expect. But there should already be better Charon image on the ground now as part of the failsafe transmission?

So the [Admin Edit] Grand Tour, started in the 1970s has now been fulfilled.

I wonder what the New Horizons space probe's next target will be hehe.

They said we should get some new hi-res images of the Pluto system tomorrow.

My name is on NH, along with my wife, 2 step sons and a late pet cat. .

DSN Madrid doesn't appear to be to be receiving any data from NH now ( http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html ), so I'm guessing there wasn't any scientific data tucked in right behind the systems/telemetry data (the transmission was way to short to be anything but a status update). Does anyone know when some of the science data was sent?

-kap

Presser starting. Might see some pics.

We actually just got some PEPSSI data in there too, not only telemetry. Even better!

Some pics are coming down tomorrow June 15th. NH is still collecting data. The phone home was to let everyone know the close flyby worked.

New Horizons Phones Home - Mission Update:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...;catid=1:latest

Also noticed that Emily is shaking the hands of all of the team members in the current live stream.

Edit:
NASA News Briefing on New Horizon Mission:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...;catid=1:latest

Perhaps it´s still collecting data, it´s still very near of pluto

Yeah, I was mistaken. Sorry to raise hopes; no pics tonight.

From Emily via Twitter:

The next downlink we are expecting is First Look A. It begins at
09:32 UT | 05:32 ET | 02:32 PT
and ends at
10:59 UT | 06:59 ET | 03:59 PT

(EDIT-Corrected briefing time) Apparently some of these will be released at the 1200 PDT/1900 GMT 15 Jul media event.

omg who are these people hogging the podium lol

This is a victory lap 15+ yrs in the making for many of them. Let 'em have their moment; they definitely earned it.

Thanks N.H TeAm!!

New imagery at 10x the resolution tomorrow, and images of the other moons.

Loved that question from the Pluto kid. "What is the objective of the extended mission?" Much more intelligent than some questions from the general press.

Conference is over and its 3:12 AM here. What a day! I still remember the excitement of July 20, 1969. Time to rest. Thanks for the company.
Fernando

What an unforgettable moment. Thank you to Alan Stern and the entire New Horizons team for pulling off this great human achievement.

You could clearly see the joy and excitement spilling out of the NH team in that press conference. Great stuff


The press questions were good enough, but I'm puzzled by the questions that New Horizons account gets asked on twitter (and answers them), such as "if Hubble can see galaxies in great detail, why can't it see Pluto in such detail when it's much closer?".

I was intrigued by Alan Stern's story of how they discovered that Alice (the UV spectrometer, not the operations manager) also functions as a detector for high energy electrons, and that he has half a dozen more examples [of spacecraft capabilities discovered after the design phase or launch]. I wonder what they are.

Social media pulls in comments from folks who are curious but not necessarily knowledgeable .... good thing, some learn, some are just trolls.

NASA News Briefing on New Horizon Mission:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...;catid=1:latest

I see, thanks for the info. I wonder how they create the "true-colour" images from Ralph data, then. Do they use the bicolour technique of red/blue with an artificial green channel, or ir/red/blue?

(as an aside note from me, I wish for the time in space exploration when there's a "normal" camera on every spacecraft that will take "normal" colour pictures, and we wouldn't have to deal with this matter of trying to arrange filtered images into an approx-true-colour configuration...)

Emily has a preview of tomorrow's briefing.

Congratulations to the team and all parties involved. Another great step forward in space exploration!

wildespace, we likely won't see fixed filter ccd imagers (like a 'normal camera') in most space missions. The way the images are combined are usually much worse for science investigation than bare ccd imagers. I was pretty excited about the fixed filter imager on Curiosity but it has proved problematic in some circumstances.

Mind blowing... First post here but I've been following almost days and nights the great discussion here since a few weeks... Hitting F5 key is now as natural as breathing. Since we won't get more science data before tomorrow, I take the liberty to sort out many observations, feelings and thoughts about what's happening before our eyes at the speed of light.

Being born in the early 80s, I missed the landmark explorations of the 60s and 70s, was to young to be aware of Neptune flyby. By the time I grew up, space exploration wasn't no more mainstream excitement and had no people around me curious enough to talk seriously about planets and their fascinating moons. When I learned about New Horizons 9 years ago I was so excited. Pluto has always puzzled me as a very young kid. My father had astronomy books from the 50s and 60s, most of them printed before space exploration started. I can still remember vividly that 1954 Casterman's Globerama encyclopedia for children. The 1930 photographic plate were crudely reproduced with drawings making it a mystery. I remember drawing Pluto's has I thought it would looks like.

Now, NH put a face on that white dot lost on a starry background that mystified my childish brain back then. And what a face! The kind that strikes the imagination and can't be forgotten. Better than my wildest dreams.

Congrats to NH to have push forward with this project.

But also congrats to UMSF and particularly nprev that did a subtle job channeling our energies over the last days. You folks were so dedicated to bring us the most interesting pictures under new light that it felt we were really a team processing the data to find the truth. Following media coverage is often frustrating, but this forum made it possible for a younger lad to feel for the first time in his life that special excitement to discover Terra Incognita. Wow! It's unbelievable that we are talking about complex geological and weathering processes for what was for decades a faint light in the dark. Magic! And should I say following you and seing Alan taking time to post here, made the live events even more touching and vivid. Today was my "Man on the Moon" moment shared with fellow astronomy enthusiasts. I humbly thanks you for the ride.

Pluto is a lesson of humility. That belittled and forgotten cold world has turned out to be a diversified place of tremendous interest; beyond expectation. With all those other exciting little worlds like Triton, Titan, Enceladus and many more, I think our perception of cosmos is shifting. No more this idea space is a cold and dead place with small islands of life can hold. Wherever you are in this wondeful cosmos, there is something happening, processes at work. Today's Pluto System fly-by is smearing the frontier of definitions and classifications. It's great to see the solar system is more than 8 planets but a large collection of evolving worlds with exotic personalities. Earth ain't alone in a cold "cemetery" of dead planets, but amidst "living" brethen.

I hope this will spark interest again in space exploration and the tremendous potential of KBO and other celestial bodies beyond Neptune. I hope because that big heart - the kind of thing wild imagination can't invent - looked to me as a warm invitation from the cold planet to go further, telling us if was just the beginning of a new journey. Pluto is not the goal, but the buoy that marks the new horizons. Never a mission's name was so well choosen and NH team said it: "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

On a more serious tone, I remember people here anxious about NH flying over the wrong hemisphere. I thought about the same but looks like Pluto had some serious surprises for us. Finally, it may have been the best trajectory to follow, so varied terrains, types of ices and features concentrated in a small area (well, in fact, all Pluto's faces looks promising). And yes, I agree with some people here seeing the left heart part as some kind of bassin or depressed area that was propice to accumulate ice. The circular shape with "outflows" makes it even more intriguing, almost crater-like with the steep cliffs near on the edge of dark terrain.

Sure, at this point, it's hard to tell what's highland from what's lowland, but it seems that patch of ice in the "wrong" place is linked to topography to some extent. Tomorrow's pictures should gave us more hints about it. And I'm even more curious about the bumpy terrain located right to the heart over the whale's tail. Looks like serious "erosion" occured and sculpted these patterns. We know how frost and thawing processes can harshly shape materials here on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies. I'm really curious to see how the exacerbated seasons act on Pluto. With such an elliptical orbit, I suspect the planet's appearance must change drastically depending it's distance to the sun. That must have a significant impact on the planet. Could those extremes condition trigger geological processes? How can I sleep with so much questions unanswered?

And a final thought, I'm probably not alone to have wondered over the last days about what Percival, Clyde and Venetia would have thought about seeing a distant world they hypothetized (even if Planet X was dismissed later), discovered and emblematically named for posterity. I hope they will live on Pluto in a way or another as each of them participated in building a fascinating tale. Isn't Pluto's weird orbit that opened the eyes of astronomers that something on a huge scale was going on beyond Neptune? Wasn't it Pluto's dark mythological background that sparkled so many novels that blurred the thin line between astronomy and fiction on a similar scale Mars did in the late 19th century?

Sorry with this large parenthesis about NH. Now I return to my spectator chair, sit back and enjoy the interesting geological discussions going on here. That's what happens when you try to sort out a decade of expectations! What a day!

Matt

You'll be seeing them on Insight and Mars2020 for sure. I'm uncertain what's problematic about them, they've worked great on MSL from my perspective. But they wouldn't have been the right choice for NH.

Mods might consider moving this to a more appropriate thread.

Great post matlac; lots of similar feelings here (though I was still in highschool when NH launched). Got my name on the disc before, and watched it live around lunchtime in an empty classroom. Followed on JHUAPL and on here ever since, and 2015 seemed impossible far away at the time.
Thankfully, the bird took care of itself at the critical hours, and soon the swimming pool of data will begin pouring (albeit through a drinking straw!)

True color is an elusive beast; this is a discussion that is probably somewhere on this board already, but there's barely any such thing, no matter what camera or what scheme one uses. Color is contextual, and different monitor (or printer) settings of the same image won't match, and even the degree of how dark-adapted the viewer's eye is can change perception considerably.

Apollo and some earlier missions flew film cameras, some of which used color film that was developed after it returned to Earth. But that's a trend of the past, not the future.

Someday, if we're lucky, hipster-explorers will send out "retro" probes, taking lots of film pics. But...after that the real difficulties will come, managing the wet plate/silver nitrate process safely

At any rate, feeling very fortunate to be here for all of this wonder, grateful to those who make it happen, and hoping for much more to come.

An experimental processing of the 12 July series, factor x4. Resolution seems to be increased, some tiny detailes were verified by the 14 July image.

Click to view attachment

BTW, the "phone home" signal arrived only 8 minutes and 20 seconds before the exact 50th anniversary of Mariner 4's Mars flyby (01:00:57 UTC on 15 July 1965)

While waiting for the flyby images, I'm catching up with processing of pre-flyby LORRI pictures. Here is my take on picture of 12 July:

My overall impression is that it really looks an awful lot like Mars on this hemisphere, with the western lobe of the "heart" standing in for Hellas. Plenty of muted craters...it's easy to imagine everything filled in with pulverized fluffy drifts of what would be atmosphere sunward. Spectacular image, and it's magnificently detailed in comparison to the sibling VT OOPS photo of Triton from a quarter-century before. It's difficult to wait for the steady trickle of high-resolution data ahead. May every future mission pack a scan platform, a fusion reactor, and a high-gain antenna the size of a football field.

Strong emotions watching the signal confirmation come in, and actual tears of joy and relief with the report that the data was secure, especially after the scare last week. I can't begin to express how happy I am for everyone involved. What a tremendous thrill. Also a real pleasure to follow along here.

And the Lunar Orbiter program from 1966-67 photographed on film, developed in lunar orbit and scanned with a photomultiplier tube before transmission to Earth as analog data.

--Bill

I note that the briefing later today at 19:00-20:00 UTC has the description "[r]elease of close-up images of Pluto’s surface and moons, along with initial science team reactions", but the downlink of the most exciting 0.4 km/px images of Pluto won't start until 19:25 UTC; 25 minutes into the press conference, and the entire downlink session will last 6.9 hours.

So will those images be downloaded first and we'll get to see them come down live (more or less), or will we just see images of Hydra and Charon (+ plus the slightly lower-res stereo-providing frame for Pluto)?

Never mind, those are end times. The download will finish 25 minutes into the conference.

An image where Charon is ~ 520 pixels across is coming down now.