New Horizons Probe's Images of Jupiter

SeaDour writes "The Pluto-bound New Horizons space probe, launched a little over a year ago, recently succeeded in passing through a narrow navigational keyhole by Jupiter. Using the gas giant's tremendous gravity, the craft now has a significant boost toward its final destination, shaving three years off the time it would otherwise spend en-route. As it passed through the Jovian system, the probe took some fantastic images of the neighborhood, including detailed observations of erupting volcanoes on Io, time-lapse photography of Jupiter's tumultuous atmosphere, and the faint ring system that was first discovered in Voyager photography. These new images prove the capabilities of the small probe, which is set to reach Pluto in 2015."

Comments

Re:Great!

[suv4x4]

Seriously? We launch a gajillion dollar probe, chance it in a sling around the largest planet in our solar system to only save 3 years, and we get black and white photos that have more noise than my cell-phone's camera!?

This is how the first computers looked like. And this is how their "hard drives" looked like.

It was expensive as hell, and the returns were minimal. They dared to do it first, and to improve upon their experience, so today the neighbor kid can whine how he has to wait entire 7 seconds for his physically accurate and photo realistic 3D racing car simulator game to load the entire race track, complete with realistically behaving crowd, plants and atmospheric effects.

NASA reached Pluto with a remotely controlled probe deep in space. You ranted in Slashdot. Congratulations to both for your great achievements.

Re:Great! (You must be joking)

[posterlogo]

You're kidding right? All high-end scientific cameras are monochromatic (cameras for microscopy and astronomy). This is because a "color" CCD is essentially just an approximation of what a RGB image would look like. For scientific purposes, you do NOT want a fixed color imager to be adding or subtracting data. You want imaging at particular visible wavelengths (as directed by specific filters). If you want to make a color image, you can individually take pictures at 3 visible wavelengths (e.g. RGB) and combine them. This is what the Mars rovers do. Color doesn't automatically equate mean better. Sometimes it means you get prettier images, but they're rarely more valuable than imaging with specific filters. For example, infrared and UV can also be used to image. You don't get the pretty pictures except by false coloring, but you sure as heck get a lot of valuable measurements.

Nice attempt at a rant/trolling, but maybe you don't know what you're talking about.