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New Horizons Captures First Color Image of Pluto and Charon
192_kbps writes: NASA published today the first color image of Pluto and Charon captured by the New Horizons probe, revealing a reddish world. "The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons has traveled a longer time and farther away - more than nine years and three billion miles - than any space mission in history to reach its primary target. Its flyby of Pluto and its system of at least five moons on July 14 will complete the initial reconnaissance of the classical solar system. This mission also opens the door to an entirely new "third" zone of mysterious small planets and planetary building blocks in the Kuiper Belt, a large area with numerous objects beyond Neptune's orbit." The picture is blurry, but far better than the few pixels Hubble can resolve, the image whets the appetite for New Horizon's closest approach on July 14th."
If you do an image search, nearly half of the artist renderings still depict Pluto as blue-grey in color. I think the reasoning was that the planet was thought to be largely covered in methane ice, which has that color. And they were right about the ice, but UV radiation can initiate reactions in methane and diatomic nitrogen to produce a mix of simple hydrocarbons and nitriles, similar to the orange-brown haze that shrouds Titan, just on a much less dramatic scale.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
If they knew the exact position, then just send the raw pixels for just the target area rather than an entire camera image. I'd guess the two bodies take up only about 25 x 25 pixels for that image. But I don't know the details of their compression and processing. I've read elsewhere that Pluto is roughly 5 pixels across at this time.
An interesting side fact is that they'll take a few good pre-encounter images and it will be the last images sent for roughly a month because the probe is not designed to transmit while aiming its instruments (to save money; contrast with Voyagers).
It will record everything during the fly-by for later playback. But, if it smashes into something orbiting near Pluto, the pre-encounter set may be the last images we get. Being it has at least 5 moons, there may be related debris orbiting.
Table-ized A.I.
Memory lost at NASA? How about you read the end of that sentence that you carefully pasted into your post.
"....to reach its primary target."
All the other probes primary targets were the gas giants.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
People around here seem to vastly overstate the physical significance of being a "double planet." You could just plug in known values into the equation for tidal acceleration: 2*G*(radius of body)*(mass of other body)/(distance between bodies)^3. You'll get that the tidal acceleration on Pluto is about ten times that of the Moon on Earth, but about one 200th of that of Jupiter on Ganymede, or one 2000th of that of Jupiter on Io.
It only indirectly cares about the relative size of the bodies, from the radius of the target which would be the one-third power of the target mass if assuming some density. What matters most is the distance between the bodies, due to that cube, and in case of Jupiter, that the mass is just so much larger. If you stuck Charon at the same orbital distance from the Earth, the Earth would experience more tidal forces due to its size even though the moon would be much smaller (with a barycenter just 4 km from Earth's center).
This goes doubly so if you are trying to use the crummy barycenter definition of a double planet, as you could move the Moon further from the Earth until the Earth-Moon barycenter is above the surface of the Earth, while at the same time decreasing the tidal forces.
Voyager has most of its instruments, including the cameras, on a movable platform. This allowed the positioning of the spacecraft and its high-gain antenna (the dish) to be decoupled from the positioning of the sensors. That made it very versatile and capable but, as you mentioned, more expensive. It also increases technical risk. What if the scanning platform jams up? (Some instruments could end up forever pointed back at the spacecraft! There are only so many multi-spectral selfies you would ever want to have.)
New Horzions is, for all intents and purposes, a single solid body. For 98% of its operational life, it's spin stabilized with its dish pointed squarely back towards Earth. That won't suffice for the intensive observations it was built for, so it will stop spinning and tilt itself this way and that to point its sensors at Pluto during its close encounter. Of course, when it is tilting this way and that, it is no longer pointing its main dish at Earth, so there can't be substantial communications. There is still the low-gain antenna, which is much less directional, which will allow for continuous commanding and telemetry, but has too little bandwidth for much science data to be beamed back. (more info here)