Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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starfinder
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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With just 3 weeks to go before the 14 July fly-by, NASA has released a colour animation of Pluto and Charon. This is derived from New Horizons images taken in end-May / early June at a distance of about 50 million km (about 0.3 AU).

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-and-i ... w-in-color

Pluto's colour is described as orange-biege.

Can't wait for better images!
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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3 weeks! :)
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Presenting below... perhaps one of the most detailed image of Pluto and Charon thus far. I've enhanced the very latest publically available raw image of Pluto and Charon from the New Horizons website, using Photoshop's unsharp mask, sharpening and colour picker tools.

Image taken from the LORRI telescope and imager on 27 June 2015 at 05:32:30 UTC, when Pluto was at 20.6 million km from the probe. I then colourised it based on the MVIC wide-field colour image taken on 29 May 2015. Pls see the image text for details.

Sources:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encou ... 150%20msec

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Scie ... &preview=Y

Image
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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oh dear! The probe has a glitch at present. Hopefully it will not affect the flyby when it matters most.
The probe is now running on a backup computer while engineers try to isolate the problem. At issue is that Pluto is 9 light-hours away, hence any info exchange takes 9 hrs!

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... le.com.sg/

ps..there's are rumour that the Plutonians are horrified that we refined one of its citizens into Plutonium to power the space probe!
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Hi Rich, according to Nasa, the glitch happened because New Horizon's primary computer was overloaded with too many tasks sent from mission controllers, and the probe went into safe mode; here's an interesting account of Nasa's media briefing on the glitch:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... ction.html

But it's a huge relief that science data collection (incl imaging) is due to resume late on 7 July.

What's interesting is that for the encounter days, the probe would be in encounter mode (with no more safe mode), so that if it misses some task due to a glitch, it would skip that task and go on to the next task according to the timeline.

Well, missing stuff is an inherent risk in having a fly-by and bye-bye mission instead of doing an orbit.
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Yes. Considering the hardware is 2000s era, developed at a time when Pocket PC/Palm was still king. The CPU apparently is a radiation-hardened MIPS (not ARM!) similar to the class used on my old PDAs but clocked at an incredible 12 MHz only, low even by pocketpc standards (66-216Mhz). Why my very first computer in 1988, the XT had a 8088 clocked at 12MHz and turbo'd to 16Mhz.. :) I guess they needed such low speed to maintain low power consumption and data stability in the harsh environment. But that also means processing of images, etc would be painstakingly slow. If they can put in a snapdragon processor today (radiation-hardened version of course), things would be different!
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Good news! The New Horizons probe has returned new images after recovery from the glitch.

Here's the latest publically available image taken by the monochrome LORRI imager on 7 July, at just 7.8 million km from Pluto and only 7 days before closest approach on 14 July. I then processed the image and colourised it using the MVIC colour image taken on 29 May.

It's good to see that the probe is working well again. It's now just 5 days and 12 hours from closest approach!

Source:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/index.php

Image
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Do catch NASA's special coverage of the Pluto encounter on UStream, every day for the next week. Next one at 11.30 pm Sg time.

Details here:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Participate/com ... Events.php
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Re: Pluto probe launch Tuesday night

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Finally, after a wait of over 9 years, we're down to just 23 hrs to New Horizon's closest approach, at 7.49pm S'pore time tomrw, Tues 14 July 2015!

I can still remember watching the lift-off of New Horizons 'live' at 3am Spore time on 20 January 2006.

We were all that much younger back then!

See here for the events of the next few days:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/The-Flyby.php

"The final pre-flyby images of Pluto will be unveiled during a special broadcast on Tuesday, July 14, to mark the moment New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto at 7:49 a.m. EDT."
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