Pluto pictures from New Horizons probe

[Sonny Taylor]

In the next few days (if all goes well) we'll see the most detailed pictures of the Pluto system (Pluto; its large moon Charon and other smaller moons) that we are likely to see in decades to come.

There are some pretty good and not too technical write-ups on UniverseToday about this event.

Here's one of them: http://www.universetoday.com/121317/plu ... timetable/

The flyby, picture taking and science gathering will be totally pre-programmed and automatic as Pluto is so far away that it takes over 4 hours for a signal from Earth to reach New Horizons spacecraft (and the same time again for a response). We are almost at the point that no further changes can be made to its programming.

I hope everything goes off without a glitch.

[gman313]

Me too that is very cool. That spacecraft was launched while Pluto was still considered a planet.

[Sonny Taylor]

Here's the latest image I'm aware of as New Horizons prepared to rip past the Pluto system at over 30,000 miles per hour. Hopefully there are far more details to come from all of the objects in this system.

At the time of posting this, New Horizons has already passed the Pluto system. We await the (hopefully soon) transmission of images; and plenty of science data to come over the next months.

[Sonny Taylor]

NASA has reportedly confirmed that New Horizons has survived its automated encounter with the Pluto system. As I understand it, we should be getting pictures on Wednesday morning if all went according to plan.

New Horizons is so far out there that it's expected to take until October of next year to download all of the science data it has hopefully collected. The data transmission rate is very slow due to the weak signal received by the Deep Space Network of huge dish antennae on earth. That it is even possible at all to communicate with a small probe so far away (4+ light hours away) is astonishing. Especially when you consider its limited power.

New Horizons is about the size of a baby grand piano with a dish antenna on top. It's essentially nuclear powered because the sun is too weak to use solar panels at that distance. Here's a Wikipedia description of its power source:

A cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) protrudes in the plane of the triangle from one vertex of the triangle. The RTG will provide about 250 W, 30 V DC at launch, and is predicted to drop approximately 5% every 4 years, decaying to 200 W by the time of its encounter with the Plutonian system in 2015.

The RTG relies on heat generated by a mass of decaying Plutonium (a fitting name actually). With only 200 watts to power everything on the space craft, it's amazing that it can transmit a signal across the void to earth at all.

Here's a picture of the RTG with the spacecraft behind it before launch...



We know it survived; but it has yet to tell us what it saw. Hoping for the best in anticipation.

[Symbonite]

i wonder how much data it will send after pluto...

[Sonny Taylor]

Here comes the data.

Ice mountains on Pluto:





Nice view of Charon (largest moon):




It's a pretty sure bet there's much more to come soon as the lengthy download from 3 billion miles away continues.


Source: http://www.universetoday.com/121394/nas ... on-charon/

[HP]

i wonder how much data it will send after pluto...

I was doing some reading on the mission. Basically they're off to look at whatever other rocks are floating around in the Kuiper belt. Apparently the probe is designed to run until 2020 ish at which time it will be pointed off into deep space and left to drift into interstellar space.

For those who are interested, the bitrate for transfer is 1kbps with about a 5 hour transmit time. When you consider the distance, 1kbps is pretty amazing because you have to think about how lousy the signal must be. It would take about 42 minutes per image to send pictures. Apparently the probe has an 8GB buffer to send to earth so one can do the math on how long it will take to send 8GB @ 1kbps.

[crybabycry]

Amazing and beautiful to see Pluto in detail at last.

[jccamp95]

love those pictures.

Latest picture has scientists and nerds alike very concerned

[36Drew]

Apparently the probe has an 8GB buffer to send to earth so one can do the math on how long it will take to send 8GB @ 1kbps.

A little over 2 years.