New Horizons at Pluto

Corsair 115

Penultimate Amazing
Corsair 115
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
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Between Dawn, Rosetta/Philae, and New Horizons, it's been a veritable feast of fun stuff this year for fans of astronomy. :)
 
I never used to care much about local astronomy, which is a lot of geology.
But the past ten years or so has been one exciting thing after another.
 
Here's a YouTube video of a Google Hangout from two weeks ago with some of the folks working on the project. One of the interesting things is that, while the flyby will be brief, lots of data will be collected and it will take roughly two years for the spacecraft to get it all transmitted back to Earth. So the mission will be going on for awhile after the visit. There's also been no determination yet as to what the next stop will be after Pluto.

 
Very cool. Really looking forward to this.

It's really incredible that it will take two years for all the data to get to Earth. Lots of work for astronomers coming up in the next couple of decades!
 
Nice photo from 8 million km out:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33459476

"We will get pictures 500 times better than this next Tuesday, when we have our closest approach," Dr Spencer said.
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:jaw-dropp

I'm equally interested in what they will find out about the moons and their interaction with Pluto.

The flyby occurs on the 50th anniversary of the first successful American pass of Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft.

By way of comparison, New Horizons will gather 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at the Red Planet.

New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.

It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days.
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One of the engineers on a podcast was discussing the problems associated with a 9 hour round trip time for commands to the New Horizons spacecraft, and I was amazed when he mentioned the bit rate for downloading pictures from Pluto. Here is the Wiki information.

Communication with the spacecraft is via X band. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter; at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s is expected. Besides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a latency of about 4.5 hours (one-way). The 70 m (230 ft) Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes are used to relay data beyond Jupiter. The spacecraft uses dual redundant transmitters and receivers, and either right- or left-hand circular polarization. The downlink signal is amplified by dual redundant 12-watt traveling-wave tube amplifiers (TWTAs) mounted on the body under the dish. The receivers are new, low-power designs. The system can be controlled to power both TWTAs at the same time, and transmit a dual-polarized downlink signal to the DSN that nearly doubles the downlink rate.
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ABC Star Stuff
New Horizons survives glitch to stay on course
In what sounds like a script straight out of a Hollywood thriller, the New Horizons spacecraft suddenly lost all communications with mission control for 80 minutes over the weekend. NASA identified what caused the glitch and says the craft is still on track for its historic rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14.
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foophil said:
"New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.

It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days."
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Pluto has crappy ISPs.
 
By way of comparison, New Horizons will gather 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at the Red Planet.
Click to expand...
It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days.
Click to expand...
at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s is expected.
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<mathmathmath>
So, 5 gigabytes. Why can't they just freakin' say that? We know what a gigabyte is. Why always with the comparisons to other things we don't have numbers for?

Gawdzilla Sama said:
I keep thinking "New Horizons" is a drug/alcohol rehab center, like "Passages, Malibu". In this case it would be where people where sent to chill out.
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Or the "learning center" of a chic new age cult for rich white people.

Either way, Southern California.
 
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[anerdote* on]

I once posted a question about this mission on an astronomy forum; imagine my surprise when I got a very nice, detailed reply from Dr. Alan Stern, the principal investigator, himself. I was amazed that he would take the time to answer a random question from some random yahoo.

[anerdote off]

* - "Anerdote" = a nerd anecdote
 
jhunter1163 said:
[anerdote* on]

I once posted a question about this mission on an astronomy forum; imagine my surprise when I got a very nice, detailed reply from Dr. Alan Stern, the principal investigator, himself. I was amazed that he would take the time to answer a random question from some random yahoo.

[anerdote off]

* - "Anerdote" = a nerd anecdote
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He sent a probe to Pluto. He's got time and patience to spare.
 
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