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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:22AM
from the amazingly-assonant-aliteration dept.
from the amazingly-assonant-aliteration dept.
As of this morning, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has flown by Pluto. Early images (here and here) are the best glimpses we have had of the dwarf planet. More detailed pictures are expected to be released this afternoon and over the next 16 months.
Update: New Horizons is expected to call home at 8:53 PM EDT.
Update: Contact with New Horizons re-established! Telemetry download has begun.
Update: New Horizons team unveils its first findings from the Pluto flypast – that briefing is on Wednesday at 3pm ET [sic] (8pm BST/Thursday 5am AEST) [updated at 14:59 UTC 15 July]
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Pluto Pictures Perfectly Pulchritudinous - UPDATE
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by No Respect on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:01PM
It will take 16 months to retrieve all the data from NH but at the end of the mission, how many closeup images will we have at high resolution? The spacecraft is moving very fast and has a limited amount of time to acquire imagery from the closest distances. I don't think the onboard cameras are recording at 30 fps, for instance, but I'm not sure what their technical capabilities are.
The picture taken yesterday and released this morning is stunning, but to put it into size-and-distance perspective, it was like taking a picture of our moon from the earth... if the moon was half it's actual size and twice as far away. It's not as if the camera was right on top of Pluto in that picture. Which goes back to my original ruminations on how many photos will be captured, and at what distances.
Looking forward to the phone-home signal in a few hours. Without that then what we already have will be as good as it gets. Which is still tremendous.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 16 2015, @10:45PM
How Many images?
I looked at the detailed timeline at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/The-Flyby.php [jhuapl.edu] and found three kinds of entries:
I assume that 'taking an image' means exactly that: one image. Similarly, if it says it is taking, say, 12 images, then that means 12 images. Lastly, I tallied how many 'is taking images' statements I found.
Note: the timeline runs from 20150707_000207 through 20150720_124000 EDT or a period of 14 days. Obviously, some images were taken prior to this, and one can reasonably assume there would be some more following this period as well.
Here is the breakdown for the enumerated image counts; '169 2' means there were 169 places where 'is taking 2 images' was encountered; similarly '2 180' means there were 2 places where 'is taking 180 images' was encountered.
I calculated 2022 expressly enumerated images. Add to that 62 statements of 'taking images from...' which, since it is plural, suggests that there were at least 124 more images, giving no less than 2146 images. My guess is that it would be on the order of 2500 total images.
and at what distances?
Well, ummm, lots of distances! =) But seriously, there is no simple answer to that question. best I can do is to suggest you take a look at the data from that page. As for relatively close-up activities (including images), here is a subset of that data from 1 hour before to 1 hour after the closest approach:
From the above data, it appears the highest resolution images are 'at est. resolution of 0.076 km/pix' — in other words, each pixel works out to just under 250 feet per pixel.