Slashdot Mirror
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."
And as we all know, it is Jupiters orbital velocity that gives the spacecraft its speed boost, not Jupiter's gravitational field. See: here.
Here you go:
{_@_}
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.
I was actually looking forward to seeing what comes back from the probe. But I hear Pluto is a dwarf planet...the pictures probably won't show much, since dwarves live underground.
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
Nice attempt at a rant/trolling, but maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
From the JPL website:
"This is the last of a handful of LORRI images that New Horizons is sending "home" during its busy close encounter with Jupiter - hundreds of images and other data are being taken and stored onboard. The rest of the images will be returned to Earth over the coming weeks and months as the spacecraft speeds along to Pluto."
Wait some time for the high-res...they're more interested in making sure the thing works above all else.
Whoop-de-do, slingshotting around Jupiter. They could have shaved a lot more time off the trip by slingshotting around the sun. :)
But that method is usually only reserved for Starfleet emergencies.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Probe has a finite design life. Save three years, improve the chance it will work when it's needed.
Ralph: A Visible/Infrared Imager for the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt Mission
"MVIC is composed of 7 independent CCD arrays on a single substrate. It uses two of its large format (5024x32 pixel)
CCD arrays, operated in time delay integration (TDI) mode, to provide panchromatic (400 to 975 nm) images. Four
additional 5024x32 CCDs, combined with the appropriate filters and also operated in TDI mode, provide the capability
of mapping in blue (400-550 nm), red (540-700 nm), near IR (780-975 nm) and narrow band methane (860-910 nm)
channels."
You did know that cameras like this take colour shots by merging multiple exposures with different filters applied, right? They're probably using their limited bandwidth to retrieve single exposures from each shot to get a quicker overview of what they've got.
Man... I guess that all of these scientists are really dumb and they should start taking your opinion seriously... right?
You do not launch a god dam cell phone camera on a billion dollar mission and hope to hell that it works.
Do you have any idea at all what it costs to qualify flight hardware?
Take your cost, no matter what it is, and add a couple of million to it. That is at best a starting point. That includes the fact that your cell phone would not work in a high radiation environment. The CCD would be blasted by the radiation environment.
Remember that the launch cost alone is outrageous. The instrument costs are a very small part of the total cost of the mission. A typical instrument costs around 15 million. That includes the design, development, construction, qualification, and scientific analysis of the data.
Before you pass judgment on what is and is not acceptable, please acknowledge that you are not qualified to pass such judgment.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
The asteroid fields in Star Wars are not representative of any asteroid fields we are familiar with, just like Natalie Portman isn't representative of any woman who has ever talked to me.
If Jupiter didn't exhibit a strong gravitational pull on the probe, it wouldn't be able to have a significant impact on the probe's orbital velocity.
If Jupiter were not moving w/r/t the sun and the probe, the probe's velocity w/r/t the sun would be no greater after the flyby than before.
The way I see it, both gravity and orbital velocity are necessary components of the gravitational slingshot, so it's fair to say that it's a combination of the two that give the spacecraft its speed boost.
Ding, ding, ding!
NASA (tag-teaming with fweeky): 1
Slashdot armchair cynic: 0
I don't suppose the GP has ever tried taking a picture of Jupiter with his fancy camera phone, either. He might find it a little blurry, very grainy, and surprisingly dark. Add in a little radiation and interference from moving through Jupiter's magnetic field and then transmit it 150 million miles, and layer on top of it spectrographic and radar data from the other instruments and you realize the OP's $450 (mass-produced price) cell phone with it's 3mm lens doesn't even count as a toy in comparison.
When you consider that the best images we have of Pluto currently (from the Hubble) are about 0.0005 megapixels of surface data and that New Horizons will pass a fraction of the distance from Pluto that it did from Jupiter, you begin to understand how much bang-for-the-buck this mission has to offer in understanding a body that may be one of the most numerous and least understood type of objects (KBO's) in our solar system.
There is a deadline here, and the deadline is a natural one. Right now Pluto is near its perihelion, which means it is (just barely) warm enough to have an atmosphere. There are many many things you can learn scientifically from an atmosphere. However, if the space probe takes too long to arrive at Pluto, the atmosphere will be gone by the time it gets there. In that case, we'll have to wait a cool 200 years before Pluto comes around to perihelion again.
Quoting space.com:
Scientists believe that as Pluto continues its 248-yearlong orbit around the sun, its tenuous atmosphere eventually will freeze and collapse to the surface. Pluto has been racing away from the sun since its closest approach in 1989 and scientists do not know how much time remains before Pluto's atmosphere collapses. Once that happens its atmosphere is not expected to re-emerge for about 200 years."Some people think its 20 years off and some people think its five years off," said Stern. "No one really knows when Pluto's atmosphere will snow out and collapse."