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You might want to see the photo of Europa rising from the original website : http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/imag es/HighRes/050107/050107_01.jpg ( Especially after seeing the huge title across the first picture )

You can see the originals, as the New Horizons team posts them, here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/. If you're interested in following the many space probes that are active right now at Venus, Mars and Saturn, you can also keep up with all of them at ridingwithrobots.org.

Mercury has no magnetic field and the one around Mars is patchy and not nearly as strong as the on here on Earth. Does that mean this would be better suited for terrestrial travel?

You are correct that Mars has a very weak, patchy magnetic field. However, Mercury does have a rather strong magnetic field. Mercury even has a magnetosphere, even though it does not have an atmosphere. In fact, the MESSENGER spacecraft is currently on its way to Mercury to study the planet's magnetosphere. Venus, on the other hand, does not have a magnetic field.

Your cell phone has a small lens (low light) and small CCD (susceptible to noise), and must take the shot in milliseconds, so it will be noisy for the same reasons.

Don't forget APL. They're on their way to Mercury (further distance than Mars and with a harsher climate as well).

Like the Planet Express ship, I notice the New Horizons spacecraft has a carbonated logic unit dubbed PEPSSI.

I still think Jupiter looks like a giant wood chip.

The linked picture is here.

What is this APL, and why are they named after a programming language with its own character set?

The rough & ready, easy-on-the-eye (!), pictorial version is as follows:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/science/data_collection.ht ml says that the transmission is at 38kbit/second from Jupiter, and will be at around 450bit/second from Pluto.

Cassini runs at 82kbit/second from Saturn, but it's a probe with a larger power budget.

The imager takes one-megapixel, 16bpp images, and compresses them to 100kbyte files for initial transmission, saving the originals in a few gigabytes of onboard flash; it can be instructed to send back uncompressed images if there's something interesting visible.

So an image takes about 20 seconds to transmit, plus about six minutes if you want the uncompressed version; and it takes 45 minutes to get to Earth from Jupiter. From Pluto, the images will take half an hour for the preview and twelve hours for the uncompressed image.

The New Horizons Site keeps track of the spacecraft position and distance. According to the last mission update, the light travel time is now over 1h 30m.

If the plan is to "land" on an asteroid and plant a flag (or whatever), it's probably a good idea to actually know ahead of time that there's solid ground there. If I recall correctly, the most recent asteroid fly-bys suggested that it was mostly loose gravel held together by microgravity. Imagine "landing" and finding yourself sinking into a bunch of rocks that start flying about.

This is an ancient line of reasoning going back to the pre-Apollo Lunar Surveyor missions. It was a silly argument then and now. The surface of Eros was strong enough for NEAR to land on. Ofcourse any discussion of strength in a 0.001g gravity field is kind of silly. Soil compaction, even in a low g environment will tend to increase over time as the surface is struck by impactors, even on a disrupted asteroid.

The real action is going to be on Phobos and Mars, in that order. Don't look for the next Iceland, look for the next New York City, the slam-dunk locations in space. The Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, Earth-crossing "dead" comets and Mar's small moons are good candidates.

Phobos and Deimos equatorial orbits are marginally useful for exploration. Exploration missions will likely use polar orbits because of the much greater geographic coverage and landing options.

Phobos allows both resource extraction including actual water (not maybes in polar shadows)

Phobos and Deimos are S and C type asteroids repectively. S class Eros was found to be devoid of water. It is not likely that Deimos is water rich either.

Does it have multispectral capabilities? Hah! It has a full multi-spectral imager, called CRISM, which takes essentially 4-dimensional pictures with spatial resolution below 20 meters per pixel and spectral resolution across the visible and IR ranges (362nm to 3920nm) of 6.5nm (i.e. 544 color channels). Meaning: it takes a full spectrum for every 20m x 20m (or sometimes 15m x 15m) pixel.

Try 544 channels at ~18 m/pixel.

http://crism.jhuapl.edu/instrument/innoDesign.php

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You really need a power supply with a high power/mass ratio to power an ion drive. Outside the orbit of mars this means using a real nuclear reactor (not an RTG) which automatically gives you 1-2 tonnes of extra mass.

And if you are going to put a reactor on the spacecraft you might as well build a real nuclear rocket.

The messenger mission to mercury really could have used an ion drive and a solar sail to boot. I think that was a missed opportunity.

Info on the mission can be found at:
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Too bad it will be another ten years before New Horizons gets there to really start telling what Pluto / Charon is all about.

The New Horizons probe to Pluto launches next month. The latest news has the probe launching between January 17 (a six-day delay from the original plan, due to a fuel tank problem) and February 14.

As Paul Marsh did here detecting the MRO on its way to Mars, one of the benefits of setting up the receiving system while the probe is outbound is that the signal starts out strong, so your first-generation system can be somewhat crude. As the signal weakens (over the years in the New Horizons case), you can gradually refine your setup (and perhaps count on new technology to be developed in the meantime).

BTW, for those interested in the technical details of telecommunications with NASA deep space probes, a good place to start is the Future Missions Planning Office site. It contains communication link design tools, HTML links to applicable CCSDS standards, etc.

I wouldn't classify JAXA as a minor space agency. However, it's not the first robotic landing on an asteroid. NEAR's landing is not in any dispute, as far as I know.

The NEAR mission successfully successfully executed similar mission profile to Hayabusa, minus the sample return. NEAR successfully landed on the asteroid even though it wasn't a lander at all. This after a spectacular recovery after a botched first encounter. JPL does not have a monopoly on mission management in the US. The Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins has put together an impressive number of successful missions. As for the Japanese success rate. They're learning just fine. No need for the US to train its competition.

You should also consider: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ ...

And your point is?

You should also consider: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ ...

And your point is?

If you have a an explanation - write it up. Become a famous planetary scientist.

Acutally, I happen to know there are some very competent electrodynamicists on the Cassini science team (these folks, for example), and no doubt they'll be involved in vetting hypotheses.

Hey, even Josef Stalin made it in!

You should head to the poles or even just to Canada some time.

Whether the ability for air to hold water vapor is strictly determined by temperature or not, the principles still hold.

Warmer air tends to hold more water. Cold air holds very little. Your argument says that the cold air could hold as much as the warm air. Perhaps this is theoretically true, but it practice it doesn't seem to actually occur.

Let me use a link here, one pointed to by your link:

http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/people/babin/vapor/index.h tml

Read the key points.

"However, because of the ubiquitous presence of condensation nuclei (e.g., dust, salt, etc.), relative humidities in the Earth's atmosphere typically do not exceed 100% at the surface or 102% within clouds."

Or perhaps above:

"Outside of clouds and close to the Earth's surface, you can consider the relative humidity not to exceed 100%."

Apparently your sources might not use the words "The relative humidity can be far higher than 100% in certain situations." as easily as you did.

I'm sorry, but an overage of 2% doesn't undermine what I said at all. One of the effects of rising temperatures would be to put more water into the air, because, in normal conditions air holds more water when it is warmer. And I have to imagine when considering the entire globe, the few cases where this guideline might be violated won't change the overall effect.

Are you happy now?

Alright, who's been trying to start a war with pluto?

I posted the following on the Adult Swim Forums: "Unfortunately, as I am a SwimNewbie I cannot start new threads so all you people must learn of this buried in a thread. Since this one is so popular, Im hoping this will get noticed. I really dont want to have to wait 2 days to let you all know!! I recently learned of this website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/scripts/addSignature sForm.php For those of you unwilling or yet unable to click the link, the site is a portal in which anyone can enter their full name which will be entered into a database and physically stored in a space probe headed to Pluto, the little rock on the outskirts of our solar system. The launch date is set for sometime this year and the name database will close on September 16th. At the time I read an article about this site, I was watching ATHF when Frylock met the Plutonians Oglethorpe and Emory. This gave me an idea! I ventured to the site and after submitting my name of course, I entered the names of all the characters on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Futurama and even a couple from Harvey Birdman. I also included the names of the voice talent for those shows. I managed to enter the entire list of minor characters in ATHF from the wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_characters_from _Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force If you go to the name database site you can search the names. Try it! Type in the name of any ATHF character and there you will see it. Displayed in all its glory before being blasted into space, on to Pluto and should it survive - return to earth in 50 thousand years. Since the database requires two name fields to be entered - one for first name one for last name - I had to split the names of certain characters who had no known last name. Frylock for example was made "Fry" "Lock." Assistant Steve became "Steve" "The Assistant." As well as Dr. Weird became "Doctor" "Weird." Futurama characters posed no problem as most of them had first and last names. So perhaps in 50 thousand years when when the apes have control of the earth, Dr. Zaius will know once and for all that humans did indeed rule Pluto with an iron fist from their megathrones on Earth. You animals! You blew it up! Pass this on!!!! -C" Welcome to the world of tomorrooow!

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/
It looks most impressive too! :D

But they let the "Federation of Active Commonwealth Terrorists" on-board, so you must have done something really really bad.

- Oisin

Good to see that Seymour Butz is going, along with all of Bart's other calls to Moe's.

PS: The A.C. validation word for today is... "adultery". Amazing...

Done! My contribution to mankind: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=257295

You think that's bad? Look at this one:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=5

Yeah, i know it is boring, but due to the basic GET use, here is the first person to be signed up to go to pluto:
Link

Really??? When it gets to Pluto-Charon in 2015, you mean we will have already built and launched a faster craft that will already be there? Your insight rivals only your lack of reading ability!

Be careful what you're calling stupid, it might turn out that the only thing stupid is your lack of research before posting. Not to mention the people who modded you Interesting.

'Pointless' would be commenting on an article without reading the damn thing. Start here:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.h tml

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=93063

Wonder how many of these they are going to filter?

M Vick of the Falcons also appears to have been to th site (probably read about it on /. based on the date): http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=249564

Mickey Mouse has quite a few entries as well.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=93063

Wonder how many of these they are going to filter?

M Vick of the Falcons also appears to have been to th site (probably read about it on /. based on the date): http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=249564

Mickey Mouse has quite a few entries as well.

Who's Alysen Regiec and why is she driving?

Looks like you should start warning your descendents.

now get off my lawn!

your mamma in space

Damn! Someone beat me to the First Post on Pluto

Visted
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/scripts/addSignature sForm.php
Flash file on the web page is topping my CPU silly flash file.

Was about to place my name on this web-site, but they only want my firstname and surname ?? damn i know of a least one person with the same name as me in England, what a silly idea.

Should we just send some footage of are world-wars to give the aliens half a chance to turn around.

According to this , the database is quite open to abuse. I hope they clean it up, unless the NASA experiment involves spamming other planets and civilizations.

This post is directed to everyone saying that a 50,000 year mission is [stupid | pointless | depressing].

This is not a 50,000 year mission. This is a ~14 year mission. Look at the bloody timeline (and map!):
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.h tml

The encounter with Pluto happens in 2015, if all goes according to plan (i.e. Jupiter gravity assist). After Pluto, another 5 years of checking out Kuiper Belt objects.

But look at the trajectory, it's nearly a straight line to Pluto (as opposed to an arc bringing the craft back this way). The point of this mission is NOT to bring the spacecraft back to this planet, but it JUST SO happens that in 50,000 years or so, gravity will have pulled the thing back this direction.

See? Reading is fun! I just think it's funny that someone will take the time to make an uninformed post but won't take the time to try and learn anything.

And coming in at #5, it's the Federation of Active Commonwealth Terrorists!

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/certificate/reprint. php?insertedIDreprint=5

The point of this is to get kids interested in science.

Why did it take so long to reach slashdot, or is it a dupe?

Note: I'm not new here, but these things should be on slashdot a bit quicker, although it might have been an internal NASA thing for a while