Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures

sighted writes "The New Horizons probe, on its way to Pluto and beyond, is now speeding toward Jupiter. Today the team released some of the early data and pictures, which are the first close-range shots of the giant planet since the robotic Cassini spacecraft passed that way in 2001."

Comments

This just in...

[muindaur]

Nasa has discovered Jupiters gas was produced by CowboyNeal.

Re:How long does this take?

[rumith]

10 hours from Pluto in average. 45 minutes from Jupiter in average. Don't know whether they'll in their aphelion or perihelion now, so can't say more precisely.

Did anyone remember to tell the probe...

[simm1701]

.. that pluto isn't a planet any more???

I certainly hope so, otherwise it could get really embarrassed when it tries to ask for directions!!

All these planets are yours

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

well this is where they are

[rucs_hack]

their exact position today can be found in the JPL Horizons database
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

so using Sol as Origin [0,0,0], with distance in km and km/s velocity measures:
XYZ position and velocity in Km and Km/sec
V prefix = velocity,

Jupiter
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-3.523007925524937E+08 Y =-7.203651223053448E+08 Z = 1.087397270750013E+07
  VX= 1.158611696091788E+01 VY=-5.127849980674650E+00 VZ=-2.378734986696975E-01

Earth
  A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-7.005151113800500E+07 Y = 1.294518808525130E+08 Z =-1.647040773451328E+03
  VX=-2.669513206382950E+01 VY=-1.429493892074527E+01 VZ=-5.052885705412180E-04

And the Horizons probe itself is here:
A.D. 2007-Jan-19 00:00:00.0000 (CT)
  X =-3.141011231236297E+08 Y =-6.673772181265557E+08 Z = 9.200702373118341E+06
  VX= 1.154291925552546E-01 VY=-1.978644188955009E+01 VZ= 1.493924692614632E-01

However it's too early to work out the times taken for signals to travel based on these positions. I need more coffee.

Re:well this is where they are

[KiloByte]

Pythagoras' theorem says the distance in R3 (ie, euclidean space) is sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2+(z1-z2)^2).
That is, the distance between Earth and Jupiter right now is: 8.95528824E8 km.

Dividing that by c gives 2987 seconds. So, right now the half-ping is 50 minutes.

By similar calculation, you can get that EarthNew Horizons is 2779.975 s =~ 46 minutes.

Re:well this is where they are

[FallOfDay]

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

Re:well this is where they are

[jslater25]

I like to write zero as 0.00E8. How do you write zero?

Re:well this is where they are

[beckerist]

A cool slight diversion: this is exactly the reverse process of how Ole Roemer in the 1670's came up with his estimate of the speed of light.

Re:well this is where they are

[geobeck]

does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end...

I just think the 16 decimal places are kind of overkill because, by the time you write them down, everything after the fifth or sixth one has changed because the objects are moving relative to each other.

+2 Interesting!? Mod Parent Down

[physicsnick]

it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.

Voyager 1 will take on the order of several hundred thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri.

The traditional explanation for this is that the graviton can only travel at the speed of light and as such will take 10 minutes to travel from one particle to the other, so far so good.

The 'traditional' explanation? Gravitons are hypothetical at best, and currently mathematically useless. Quantized force mediators do not need to "intercept" a moving particle at a distance; they are virtual, and there are infinitely many of them in all directions.

By changing the mass of the ball (simple enough to do with a powerful laser)

This is all nonsense. Even if this were true, your probe is also receiving gravitons from every other atom in the universe. The effect of varying a "ball of mass" would not even be measurable. Just because a sizable block of text with "sciency words" is posted doesn't mean it's meaningful, and certainly doesn't deserve mod points. Please mod parent down, and please read things before giving points!

Re:How long does this take?

[Tom Womack]

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.

Re:Communication a problem

[Captain Hook]

I was thinking in terms of thrusters to be able to align the probe towards earth/anything interesting that might be out there such as a Vogon Construction Fleet.

Re:How long does this take?

[gsslay]

Unfortunately it then zips the compressed image into a self-extracting exe, so NASA's anti-virus strips it off at the mail server.

Re:Communication a problem

[Teancum]

I think he has mistaken the idea that Voyager will leave the solar system in 2009, as defined by the region of space where the solar wind is overcome with other stellar matter from the rest of the Milky Way, and presumably in the region of space roughly where the Oort Cloud is likly to be located at. At that point you could presumably suggest that it is in interstellar space and the gravitational influence of the Sun is insignificant compared to other objects in the rest of the Galaxy.

While that is in reality a major accomplishment in terms of having a human artifact leave the solar system, it is a far cry from being able to reach another star system, especially Alpha Centauri. Especially as Alpha Centauri is hardly in the plane of the ecliptic (where most of the planets are located at), requiring some very precise trajectory calculations that would have made the visit to the outer planets by Voyager too difficult to perform.

The primary mission of Voyager was to visit the gas giants of the Solar System, and it did that spectacularly. Anything else it has done or is doing now is incidental extra science, as we are now getting scientific measurements of the environment that is very far from the Earth.

Just an Opinion...

[Thumper_SVX]

I'm really excited about New Horizons. It's a really exciting mission that almost didn't get the support it needed. If you do some Googling you can find out the full story about it.

Hell, I know Pluto isn't considered a planet... but that to me makes NH even more exciting. Pluto is a large KBO (Kuiper Belt Object) and as such has the potential to be a very early remnant of the formation of our solar system. As such, investigating this object and Charon, it's "moon" has the potential to teach us far more about the early existence of the solar system than investigating many other objects. To be honest, I'm MORE excited about a trip to a relatively unknown and uncharted object such as a KBO than I would be over the exploration of another planet (despite the fact that these are arbitrary designations at best)

The NEAR mission was fascinating for the same reason. It was investigation of a relatively unknown object and we learned far more about the nature of asteroids and other deep space objects during that mission than we ever thought possible. If NH even returns half of the information about Pluto that NEAR returned about the asteroid Eros then we will learn an incredible amount about our solar system, and maybe change a few models about solar system formation that might just change some minds.

Good show, NASA. Sometimes you're the butt of a lot of jokes, but there are times you manage some truly remarkable missions (the mars rovers for one) that increase our understanding of the universe and just really excite science geeks like me :)

Wha???

[Cervantes]

"Pluto Probe Snaps Jupiter Pictures"

Holy crap, they made another metric/imperial conversion error!