Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday February 14 2018, @11:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-think-you-have-challenges-with-debugging? dept.

Recently, the New Horizons spacecraft took the furthest images ever made from Earth. But they weren't of Earth. That could change in 2019:

Sometime after January 2019, New Horizons, the spacecraft that brought us photos of the heart-shaped terrain on Pluto, will turn back toward Earth. The probe's camera, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI for short, will start snapping away. Nearly three decades after the original, humanity will get another "Pale Blue Dot."

"We've been talking about it for years," says Andy Cheng of the plan to take another 'Pale Blue Dot' image. Cheng is a scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and the principal investigator for LORRI.

It's a risky move. The attempt requires pointing LORRI close enough to the sun so that objects in the darkness are illuminated, but not so close that sunlight damages or destroys the camera. "But we're going to do it anyway, for the same reason as before," Cheng says. "It's just such a great thing to try."

The photo shoot will take considerable coordination. "All activities on the spacecraft need to be choreographed in elaborate detail and then checked and checked again," Cheng says. "Taking a LORRI image involves more than just LORRI—the spacecraft needs to point the camera in the right direction, lorri needs to be operated, the image data needs to be put in the right place and then accessed and transmitted to Earth, which requires more maneuvers of the spacecraft, all of which needs to happen on a spacecraft almost 4 billion miles away."

New Horizons will fly by 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. It will take about 18 months to send back all the data from the flyby.

Related: Occultations of New Horizons' Next Target (2014 MU69) Observed
New Horizons Target 2014 MU69 May be a "Contact Binary"


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 14 2018, @09:05PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday February 14 2018, @09:05PM (#637878)

    Well, 1) we already have that photo, for what it's worth, and 2) it's not much of a photo: Earth is just a single pixel and you can't make out anything else, as the vague color bands are just an artifact of sunlight scattered by the camera's optics, and there's a ton of noise. There's no reference here at all; in photographic terms, it's really quite lousy. I guess at the time it made sense because they didn't think the probe would keep working and being useful much beyond Saturn, so they didn't think they were risking much, and the team that controlled the spacecraft were all being transferred to other projects too. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, Voyager 1 powered its cameras down after this photograph and never used them again. This just isn't the case with New Horizons; it has another mission coming up soon, as soon as it gets near 2014 MU69.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:11AM (#637965)

    It does seem a waste of propellant if there's other work to be done.