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Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 5 2007, 10:29 PM

The Tip of the Iceberg

March 5, 2007

The intensive phase of Jupiter encounter operations is winding down, but it's not yet over. In the first days of this week, we still have Radio Science Experiment (REX) and Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) calibrations using Jupiter system targets, and some imaging to better determine the shapes and photometric phase curves of Jupiter's satellites Elara and Himalia. After that, the encounter becomes almost entirely magnetotail exploration using the Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP), Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI), and Venetia (Student Dust Counter) instruments; this final phase of the encounter lasts until mid-June.

In the past week, we conducted more than 98 separate observing sequences comprising several hundred observations. I am sure that if you're reading this, you've seen some or the entire handful of images we released in the past week — such as the beautiful LORRI imagery of Jupiter's Little Red Spot and Io's Tvashtar volcano. Well, those data represent less than 1/1000th of what we still have to send down, including color imager, more high-resolution LORRI shots, ultraviolet and infrared spectra galore, and, of course, plasma data. So while the "tip of the tip" of the iceberg is now on the ground to whet appetites, we won't have the entire dataset we've taken - all 36 gigabits! - on the ground until at least late April. But don't despair, we will begin downlinking operations this Wednesday, March 7, and will be sending back a few gigabits each week. So you should expect to see nearly weekly data releases coming from New Horizons throughout March and April.

New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice
Bowman gives Principal Investigator Alan Stern
an update following the spacecraft's closest
approach to Jupiter on February 28, 2007.
Behind them, Deputy Mission Ops Manager Nick
Pinkine monitors the spacecraft status screens.
Both the mission and science operations teams
will have much more data to downlink from New
Horizons in the coming months.
(Click on the images to view for larger versions.)

As things settle down on the spacecraft, we've already begun planning the last portions of our instrument payload commissioning tests — things we put off until after the rush of the Jupiter encounter. We're also planning some hibernation-mode testing for April and a tiny, "jogging speed" course-correction maneuver on May 23 to trim up our trajectory.

That's it for now, but I'll be back with more news and views soon. Meanwhile, keep on exploring, as we do!
- Alan Stern

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 10 2007, 03:22 AM

Alien Volcano

March 9, 2007: Andy Cheng has seen it all. The scientist from Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab has worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Cassini mission to Saturn, the NEAR mission to asteroid 433 Eros and many others during his decades-long career. Alien vistas are old hat to him.

But even he was amazed when he laid eyes on this photo of Io's Tvashtar volcano, taken Feb. 28th by the New Horizons spacecraft:

Above: A volcanic eruption on Io photographed by New Horizons on Feb. 28, 2007. [More]

Omigod! I can't believe it. "That was my first reaction," says Cheng. "The LORRI image of the Tvashtar plume is the best and most detailed plume image that any of us -- including longtime Jupiter experts -- have ever seen."

LORRI is an 8-inch telescope onboard New Horizons, NASA's Pluto-bound spacecraft. "The telescope was designed to take high-resolution pictures of Pluto and its moons when New Horizons reaches the outer solar system in 2015," explains Cheng, the principal investigator for LORRI, which is short for Long Range Reconnaissance Imager.

Last week New Horizons flew past Jupiter for a quick velocity boost, and "this gave us an opportunity to take some pictures," he says. Cheng and colleagues trained the telescope on Jupiter's moons Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede and on Jupiter itself. Many of the pictures are stunning: gallery.

"Future LORRI images of Pluto and Charon will have even more detail and higher resolution, because New Horizons will bring us at least a thousand times closer than we came to Io," notes Cheng. Of course, no one has any idea what LORRI will see, because Pluto has never been visited by a space probe. "That's why we're going."

Catching a volcano blowing its top on Io isn't really a big surprise, notes Cheng. "Io is in a constant state of eruption."

To understand why, he suggests, dig a paperclip out of your desk drawer. Flex the clip rapidly back and forth many times, and touch the flexure. Careful! It's hot. The combination of flexing + internal friction heats the clip to surprisingly high temperatures.

see captionThe same thing happens to Io. Gravitational forces exerted on Io by Jupiter and the other large moons raise tidal bulges in Io's solid crust 30 meters high. This flexing action, like the flexing of a paperclip, makes Io's interior molten hot and, as a result, the moon has hundreds of active volcanoes.

Above: An exaggerated rendition of Io's terrible tides. [More]

"We were actually hoping to catch a different volcano—Prometheus," says Cheng. Prometheus is an old and reliable volcano on Io which has been photographed many times before by Voyager and Galileo. It appears in the New Horizons photo, too; "It's the little mushroom-shaped plume at 9 o'clock," he points out.

Tvashtar's plume dwarfed grand old Prometheus, rising 180 miles (290 km) above Io's surface. (For comparison, volcanoes on Earth spew their gas and dust just a few miles high.) "The patchy and filamentous structure seen in the Tvashtar plume suggests to me that condensation from gas to solid particulates is occurring," he says. In other words, the gas could be crystallizing in the cold space above Io to form a kind of sulfurous snow.

Volcanoes spewing snow? It is an alien world.

On to Pluto!

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program of medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. The Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the New Frontiers Program for NASA Headquarters. The JHU Applied Physics Laboratory manages the New Horizons mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

____________________________________________

More to the story...

New Horizons -- mission home page

Grand Theft Pluto -- (Science@NASA) New Horizons flew past Jupiter on Feb. 28th and stole some velocity for its trip to Pluto

[email="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos.html"]Jupiter Flyby Photo Gallery[/email]

[b]New Horizons Animations[/b]

Credits: New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program of medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. The Discovery and New Frontiers Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the New Frontiers Program for NASA Headquarters. The JHU Applied Physics Laboratory manages the New Horizons mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission team also includes NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the U.S. Department of Energy, Washington; Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and several corporations and university partners.

NASA's Future: The Vision for Space Exploration

Source: Science@NASA

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 10 2007, 03:27 AM

Jupiter's Rings

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped this photo of Jupiter's ring system on February 24, 2007, from a distance of 7.1 million kilometers (4.4 million miles).

This processed image shows a narrow ring, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) wide, with a fainter sheet of material inside it. "This is one of the clearest pictures ever taken of Jupiter's faint ring system," says Dr. Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who planned many of the ring images. "The ring looks different from what we expected — it has usually appeared much wider."

Showalter suggests that the ring's largest boulders are corralled into a narrow belt by the influence of Jupiter's two innermost moons, Adrastea and Metis. The ring also appears to darken in the middle, a possible hint that a smaller, undiscovered moon is clearing out a gap. "If there is a smaller moon within those rings, we hope to see it in some of the hundreds of additional images that New Horizons will transmit back to Earth over the next several weeks," says Dr. Andy Cheng, LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Click here for an annotated version of the image.

Showalter adds that the faint glow extending in from the ring is likely caused by fine dust that diffuses in toward Jupiter. This is the outer tip of the "halo," a cloud of dust that extends down to Jupiter's cloud tops. The dust will glow much brighter in pictures taken after New Horizons passes to the far side of Jupiter and looks back at the rings, which will then be sunlit from behind.

Jupiter's ring system was discovered in 1979, when astronomers spied it in a single image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Months later, Voyager 2 carried out more extensive imaging of the system. It has since been examined by NASA's Galileo and Cassini spacecraft, as well as by the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based observatories.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 12 2007, 05:55 PM

Downlink Initiated

March 12, 2007

New Horizons is about 0.15 astronomical units from Jupiter now, and already 5.5 AU from the Sun! Our final imaging and spectroscopy observations of Jupiter system targets wrapped up last week. Henceforth, the only Jupiter system observations New Horizons will make are magnetotail environment measurements using our PEPSSI and SWAP charged-particle spectrometers and, beginning in April, interplanetary dust measurements by Venetia, our Student Dust Counter.

On March 7, the spacecraft began downlinking its storehouse of 36-plus gigabits of Jupiter data. From now though May, we expect to receive 6 to 8 hours of Deep Space Network time, virtually every day, for this data playback. Already a variety of Alice ultraviolet and Ralph infrared spectra, as well as LORRI images of Jupiter, its tenuous ring system and of its moon Io, have been sent to the ground. Every week, for the next 8 to 10 weeks, you can expect to see one or more image releases at our mission Web site.

Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., prepare
for contact with New Horizons following the Jupiter
flyby on Feb. 28. Operations now involve downlinking
several gigabits of science data from the Jupiter
encounter.
(Click on the images to view for larger versions.)

The next big event on the spacecraft occurs March 21, when we fire our maneuvering jets to spin the spacecraft up like a top, stably rotating it at 5 RPM to save fuel now that the pointing operations associated with the Jupiter flyby are complete. This is how we flew most of the cruise to Jupiter, and it's also the way we'll fly most of the way to Pluto.

Although I won't be writing weekly blogs now that Jupiter is well behind us, you can look forward to a late-April or early-May press conference to show off some of the most exciting data we've received. Meanwhile, keep on exploring, as we do!
- Alan Stern

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 13 2007, 09:21 PM

A Midnight Plume

The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons captured another dramatic picture of Jupiter's moon Io and its volcanic plumes, 19 hours after the spacecraft's closest approach to Jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007. LORRI took this 75 millisecond exposure at 0035 Universal Time on March 1, 2007, when Io was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from the spacecraft.

Io's dayside is deliberately overexposed to bring out faint details in the plumes and on the moon's night side. The continuing eruption of the volcano Tvashtar, at the 1 o'clock position, produces an enormous plume roughly 330 kilometers (200 miles) high, which is illuminated both by sunlight and "Jupiter light."

The shadow of Io, cast by the Sun, slices across the plume. The plume is quite asymmetrical and has a complicated wispy texture, for reasons that are still mysterious. At the heart of the eruption incandescent lava, seen here as a brilliant point of light, is reminding scientists of the fire fountains spotted by the Galileo Jupiter orbiter at Tvashtar in 1999.

The sunlit plume faintly illuminates the surface underneath. "New Horizons and Io continue to astonish us with these unprecedented views of the solar system's most geologically active body" says John Spencer, deputy leader of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team and an Io expert from Southwest Research Institute.

Because this image shows the side of Io that faces away from Jupiter, the large planet does not illuminate the moon's night side except for an extremely thin crescent outlining the edge of the disk at lower right. Another plume, likely from the volcano Masubi, is illuminated by Jupiter just above this lower right edge. A third and much fainter plume, barely visible at the 2 o'clock position, could be the first plume seen from the volcano Zal Patera.

As in other New Horizons images of Io, mountains catch the setting Sun just beyond the terminator (the line dividing day and night). The most prominent, seen as a bright vertical line, is the edge of a plateau about 4.5 kilometers (15,000 feet) high, similar in altitude to the Colorado Rockies. Io itself has a diameter of 3,630 kilometers (about 2,250 miles).

The image is centered at Io coordinates 4 degrees S, 165 degrees W. It has been processed to reduce contrast, in order to show details over the full 1000-to-1 brightness range of the original data.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 16 2007, 10:39 PM

A Look from LEISA

On February 24, 2007, the LEISA (pronounced "Leesa") infrared spectral imager in the New Horizons Ralph instrument observed giant Jupiter in 250 narrow spectral channels. At the time the spacecraft was 6 million kilometers (nearly 4 million miles) from Jupiter; at that range, the LEISA imager can resolve structures about 400 kilometers (250 miles) across.

That may seem large, mission scientists say, but Jupiter itself is more than 144,000 kilometers (89,000 miles) across. "The detail revealed in these images is simply stunning," says Dr. Dennis Reuter, Ralph/LEISA project scientist and a New Horizons co-investigator from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our instrument is performing spectacularly well."

LEISA observes in 250 infrared wavelengths, which range from 1.25 micrometers (µm) to 2.50 µm. The three images shown above from that dataset are at wavelengths of 1.27 µm (left), 1.53 µm (center) and 1.88 µm (right).

The bright areas in the image frames are caused by solar radiation reflected from clouds and hazes in Jupiter's atmosphere. Dark areas correspond to atmospheric regions where solar radiation is absorbed before it can be reflected. The dark circular feature in the upper left of all three images is the shadow of Jupiter's innermost large moon, Io.

Light at 1.53 µm (center frame) comes from relatively high in the atmosphere. The other two channels probe deeper atmospheric levels. Features that are bright in all three pictures come from high-altitude clouds. Features that are bright in the 1.27 and 1.88 µm channels, but darker in the 1.53-µm channel come from lower clouds. For example, there is an isolated circular feature (the "Little Red Spot") in the lower left of the 1.53-µm image. In the 1.27 and 1.88 µm data, this circular feature is surrounded by other structures. The implication is that the "Little Red Spot" is caused by a system that extends far up into the atmosphere, while other structures are lower.

"The three frames shown here are just a sampling of what LEISA returned in this dataset," says Dr. Don Jennings, LEISA principal investigator and a New Horizons co-investigator from NASA Goddard. "Combining data from all 250 channels will allow us to make detailed three-dimensional maps of the composition and circulation of the Jovian atmosphere."

At closest approach to Jupiter on February 28, at a distance of about 2.5 million kilometers (1.4 million miles), LEISA's resolution was about three times better than it was on February 24. LEISA images made at that far-better resolution are still stored in the spacecraft's data recorder, awaiting downlink from New Horizons.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 20 2007, 10:10 PM

Alice Views Jupiter and Io

This graphic illustrates the pointing and shows the data from one of many observations made by the New Horizons Alice ultraviolet spectrometer (UVS) instrument during the Pluto-bound spacecraft's recent encounter with Jupiter. The red lines in the graphic show the scale, orientation, and position of the combined "box and slot" field of view of the Alice UVS during this observation.

The positions of Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io, the torus of ionized gas from Io, and Jupiter are shown relative to the Alice field of view. Like a prism, the spectrometer separates light from these targets into its constituent wavelengths.

"These ultraviolet datasets are spectacular, simply spectacular," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, who also serves as PI of the Alice instrument. "The team is ecstatic over the richness of the spectral data and what that promises to reveal about Io's complex relationship with Jupiter."

Dr. Kurt Retherford, New Horizons science team collaborator from the Southwest Research Institute, said, "The Alice team aimed the instrument's field of view to simultaneously obtain spectra of three major targets in the Jupiter system: the moon Io, the ionized gas torus Io creates around Jupiter, and Jupiter itself."

Io's volcanoes produce an extremely tenuous atmosphere made up primarily of sulfur dioxide gas, which, in the harsh plasma environment at Io, breaks down into its component sulfur and oxygen atoms. Alice observed the auroral glow from these atoms in Io's atmosphere and their ionized counterparts in the Io torus.
"This UV observation of Io surpasses those from all previous spacecraft to visit Jupiter in terms of signal quality and wavelength coverage, and this is only the first of roughly 80 such spectra to be downlinked to Earth," said Retherford. "The Alice observations of Jupiter's upper atmosphere can tell us much about the concentrations of gases there."

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 22 2007, 09:55 PM

LORRI Takes an Even Closer Look at the Little Red Spot

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has returned stunning new images of Jupiter's Little Red Spot, obtained as a 2-by-2 mosaic at 0312 UTC on February 27, 2007, from a distance of 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles). The image scale is 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) per pixel.

By comparison, team members say, ground-based and Earth-orbiting imagers rarely do better than 200-kilometer (130-mile) resolution on Jupiter.

"These LORRI images of the Little Red Spot are amazing in their detail," says New Horizons Project Scientist Dr. Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where the spacecraft and LORRI camera were designed and built. "They show the early stages of this newly reddened storm system with a resolution that far surpasses anything available until now."

LORRI took this mosaic 9½ hours - or not quite one Jupiter rotation period - after snapping its previous images of the Little Red Spot on Feb 26, 2007, at a longer range of 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) and at a lower resolution of 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) per pixel. The new mosaic was obtained with the Little Red Spot closer to the center of the visible disk of Jupiter, so there is less foreshortening and better illumination.

The Little Red Spot is an Earth-sized storm on Jupiter that changed its color from white to red in 2005. Swimming to the east, its clouds rotate counterclockwise (or in the anticyclonic direction), meaning that it is a high-pressure region. In that sense, the Little Red Spot is the opposite of a hurricane on Earth, which is a low-pressure region - and it is of course much larger than any hurricane on Earth.

Scientists don't know exactly how or why the storm turned red - though they speculate that the change could stem from a surge of exotic compounds from deep within Jupiter, caused by an intensification of the storm system. In particular, sulfur-bearing cloud droplets might have been propelled about 50 kilometers into the upper level of ammonia clouds, where brighter sunlight bathing the cloud tops released the red-hued sulfur embedded in the droplets - causing the storm to turn red. A similar mechanism has been proposed for the Little Red Spot's "big brother," the Great Red Spot, a massive energetic storm system that has existed for centuries.

The smaller, brighter oval to the south of the Little Red Spot is another storm moving more rapidly to the east, as can be seen by comparing the previous mosaic to the newer one. Any feature that moved by as much as 100 pixels between the earlier mosaic and the new one - as many features have done - has shifted at an average relative speed faster than 95 miles per hour, indicating hurricane force winds. The awesome violence of the storms in Jupiter's atmosphere contrasts with the serene isolation of New Horizons' LORRI, snapping pictures from millions of miles away.

"The new images are further proof that LORRI is one of the best imagers ever flown on a planetary mission," says Dr. Andy Cheng, the LORRI principal investigator from the Applied Physics Laboratory, "and more delights are yet to come."

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 26 2007, 05:09 PM

Trip Report

March 26, 2007

New Horizons tripped up but recovered itself without a nasty spill last week. This event occurred on the afternoon of March 19, precisely 14 months to the day since we launched.

What do I mean by saying that the spacecraft "tripped?" What actually happened was that an uncorrectable memory error was detected in the memory of our primary Command and Data Handling (C&DH) computer, which is the "brains" of New Horizons. Although onboard error detection routines can and did recognize such an error within seconds of its occurrence, the error was so severe (a double-bit error in a single memory word) that there was no definitive way for our error-correction algorithm to unambiguously restore the correct series of 1's and 0's in this memory location. (Our memory, like that on many other spacecraft, is encoded such that a single-bit error can both be detected and corrected; a double-bit error can be detected, but there isn't sufficient information encoded to be sure how to correct it.)

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory -
builders of the actual New Horizons spacecraft -
built a full-scale model of New Horizons for the
Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Here, the model is shown on display in the lobby
of NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., this
past January.
(Click on the images to view for larger versions.)

Since a bad word in C&DH memory could invoke an unpredictable spacecraft action, C&DH is programmed to command itself to reboot (and thus restore memory from a boot PROM) whenever such an double-bit error is detected. But whenever C&DH resets, our onboard autonomous fault-detection and -protection system declares an emergency and commands the spacecraft to suspend all current activities and go to a "Safe Mode."

Given the spacecraft mode and state on the afternoon of March 19, the result was that the bird was spun up from 3-axis control to a stable 5-RPM spin, and its antenna was pointed to Earth and commanded to call home for help. New Horizons also commanded itself to shut off unessential power loads (like the PEPSSI and SWAP instruments, which had been collecting Jupiter magnetotail data) and go to an emergency (low) bit rate for downlink.

In an amazing stroke of luck, the NASA Deep Space Network and our control center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab were actually in contact with the spacecraft when this even occurred, so our ground team saw - in real-time - the double-bit error, the resulting C&DH computer reset, and the spacecraft commanding itself to "Go Safe."

The Go Safe maneuver itself resulted in a temporary loss of contact with our baby, but within about 90 minutes, New Horizons was back in communication with Earth, and shortly thereafter, the ground control team at APL had re-established commanding capability.

This was the first time New Horizons had commanded itself to Go Safe in flight, and both the spacecraft and the APL ground team responded expertly. As a result, we regained spacecraft control quickly, and we were back in a nominal operations configuration - taking science data again - in less than two days.

What actually caused the spacecraft C&DH memory to be corrupted with a two-bit error in a single C&DH address? We're still trying to determine that, but early indications are it was related to a burst of four bit errors within a short time that may have been due to RTG or natural space-environment radiation. Such multi-event bursts have not been uncommon in flight, but they have only once before resulted in a double-bit error in the Guidance and Control (not the C&DH) processor. The event is less critical in the G&C processor, because the spacecraft can operate through such an event, so no Go Safe was required.

Will such Go Safes happen again? Quite possibly. Can we find a way to better protect against such events so they don't occur as frequently as they might otherwise have? Maybe, and we're looking into it. Will the spacecraft take care of itself as it did this time? Our confidence is high that it will - extensive ground testing of the autonomy system and its Go Safe response paid off on March 19, and because of the test of the Go Safe function in flight last Monday, we have even greater confidence in our "autopilot" than we did from ground testing alone.

Of course, no one - and most particularly this mission PI - wanted such an in-flight test of contingency procedures. But New Horizons didn't ask our permission, and we got our Go Safe test, like it or not. What we learned as a result is that our flight system - both the silicon part in space and the carbon part in Maryland - responded with grace and precision to recover without causing any real injury.

This event is a reminder of the very real risks of space flight and the long journey we have ahead in order to accomplish our goal of reconnoitering the Pluto system at the far end of the planetary frontier. So we proceed with both confidence and a renewed sense of the fact that we are playing for keeps. We are now also back to downlinking Jupiter encounter data; back to taking Jovian magnetotail measurements; and back to preparing to initiate hibernation operations this summer.

Onward we go, into the cold, yawning abyss that is the outer solar system, with our eyes, minds and hearts firmly fixed on our goal of a history-making scientific exploration of worlds where no one has gone before!

Well, that's all I wanted to tell you about this time. I'll be back with more news in another update in April. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we do.
- Alan Stern

Pluto remains unexplored, as it was when this 1990 stamp was
released. It is our job to see the safe flight to and flyby of New
Horizons at Pluto some eight years hence.
(Click on the images to view for larger versions.)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons

Barek Halfhand

Mar 26 2007, 07:31 PM

QUOTE(Waspie_Dwarf @ Mar 26 2007, 11:09 AM) [snapback]1600600[/snapback]

[New Horizons tripped up but recovered itself without a nasty spill last week. This event occurred on the afternoon of March 19, precisely 14 months to the day since we launched.

What do I mean by saying that the spacecraft "tripped?" What actually happened was that an uncorrectable memory error was detected in the memory of our primary Command and Data Handling (C&DH) computer, which is the "brains" of New Horizons. Although onboard error detection routines can and did recognize such an error within seconds of its occurrence, the error was so severe (a double-bit error in a single memory word) that there was no definitive way for our error-correction algorithm to unambiguously restore the correct series of 1's and 0's in this memory location. (Our memory, like that on many other spacecraft, is encoded such that a single-bit error can both be detected and corrected; a double-bit error can be detected, but there isn't sufficient information encoded to be sure how to correct it.)

no such thing as B8ZS in space?..........

so what does this mean 2020 instaed of 2015?.....B

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 28 2007, 11:59 PM

QUOTE(Barek Halfhand @ Mar 26 2007, 08:31 PM) [snapback]1600759[/snapback]

so what does this mean 2020 instaed of 2015?.....B

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but if you are asking whether New Horizons will be delayed in reaching Pluto the simple answer is no.

Now that it has passed Jupiter it will simply cruise to Pluto, governed by the Laws of Gravity. Whatever happens (even if the spacecraft fails completely) it will make it's closest approach to Pluto on 14^th July 2015. There may be a few mid-course corrections along the way (these are firings of small thrusters which will be used to fine tune the course of the spacecraft) but essentially it has no engines.

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 29 2007, 12:20 AM

A Burst of Color

New Horizons captured this unique view of Jupiter's moon Io with its color camera - the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) - at 00:25 UT on March 1, 2007, from a range of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). The image is centered at Io coordinates 4 degrees south, 162 degrees west, and was taken shortly before the complementary Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photo of Io released on March 13, which had higher resolution but was not in color.

Like that LORRI picture, this processed image shows the nighttime glow of the Tvashtar volcano and its plume rising 330 kilometers (200 miles) into sunlight above Io's north pole. However, the MVIC picture reveals the intense red of the glowing lava at the plume source and the contrasting blue of the fine dust particles in the plume (similar to the bluish color of smoke), as well as more subtle colors on Io's sunlit crescent. The lower parts of the plume in Io's shadow, lit only by the much fainter light from Jupiter, are almost invisible in this rendition. Contrast has been reduced to show the large range of brightness between the plume and Io's disk.

Â A component of the Ralph imaging instrument, MVIC has three broadband color filters: blue (480 nanometers), red (620 nm) and infrared (850 nm); as well as a narrow methane filter (890 nm). Because the camera was designed for the dim illumination at Pluto, not the much brighter sunlight at Jupiter, the red and infrared filters are overexposed on Io's dayside. This image is therefore composed from the blue and methane filters only, and the colors shown are only approximations to those that the eye would see. Nevertheless, the human eye would easily see the red color of the volcano and the blue color of the plume.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 30 2007, 06:52 PM

Storm Spectra

These images, taken with the LEISA infrared camera on the New Horizons Ralph instrument, show fine details in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere using light that can only be seen using infrared sensors. These are "false color" pictures made by assigning infrared wavelengths to the colors red, green and blue. LEISA (Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array) takes images across 250 IR wavelengths in the range from 1.25 to 2.5 microns, allowing scientists to obtain an infrared spectrum at every location on Jupiter. A micron is one millionth of a meter.

These pictures were taken at 05:58 UT on February 27, 2007, from a distance of 2.9 million kilometers (1.6 million miles). They are centered at 8 degrees south, 32 degrees east in Jupiter "System III" coordinates. The large oval-shaped feature is the well-known Great Red Spot. The resolution of each pixel in these images is about 175 kilometers (110 miles); Jupiter's diameter is approximately 145,000 kilometers (97,000 miles).

The image on the left is an altitude map made by assigning the color red to 1.60 microns, green to 1.89 microns and blue to 2.04 microns. Because Jupiter's atmosphere absorbs light strongly at 2.04 microns, only clouds at very high altitude will reflect light at this wavelength. Light at 1.89 microns can go deeper in the atmosphere and light at 1.6 microns can go deeper still. In this map, bluish colors indicate high clouds and reddish colors indicate lower clouds. This picture shows, for example, that the Great Red Spot extends far up into the atmosphere.

In the image at right, red equals 1.28 microns, green equals 1.30 microns and blue equals 1.36 microns, a range of wavelengths that similarly probes different altitudes in the atmosphere. This choice of wavelengths highlights Jupiter's high-altitude south polar hood of haze. The edge of Jupiter's disk at the bottom of the panel appears slightly non-circular because the left-hand portion is the true edge of the disk, while the right portion is defined by the day/night boundary (known as the terminator).

These two images illustrate only a small fraction of the information contained in a single LEISA scan, highlighting just one aspect of the power of infrared spectra for atmospheric studies.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Barek Halfhand

Mar 30 2007, 07:20 PM

QUOTE(Waspie_Dwarf @ Mar 28 2007, 05:59 PM) [snapback]1604033[/snapback]

yep thats what I meant...
there is a section in Nasa.gov somewhere called "the basics of space flight" that explaines some of
the atsro

physics involved with gravity assist dynamics...

B8ZS in a term for T-1 or PRI povisioning that means :bipolar violation with 8 zero substitution ...(8 zeros replaces the 1 )

awsome new Jup pics! ..the New Horizons Ralph instrument is an amazing piece of equipment........B
sorry JPL http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/ basics of spaceflight

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 30 2007, 07:32 PM

QUOTE(Barek Halfhand @ Mar 30 2007, 08:20 PM) [snapback]1606511[/snapback]

B8ZS in a term for T-1 or PRI povisioning that means :bipolar violation with 8 zero substitution ...(8 zeros replaces the 1 )

I had to Google that.

Jopaan

Mar 31 2007, 02:08 AM

QUOTE

it will make it's closest approach to Pluto on 14th July 2015.

What do you mean by "closest approach"? Will the probe orbit pluto or do a flyby?

Waspie_Dwarf

Mar 31 2007, 02:30 AM

QUOTE(Jopaan @ Mar 31 2007, 03:08 AM) [snapback]1606909[/snapback]

What do you mean by "closest approach"? Will the probe orbit pluto or do a flyby?

It will do a flyby.

New Horizons is the fastest space vehicle ever launched. It would require a large amount of fuel to slow the space craft sufficiently to enter orbit around Pluto. More fuel would, of course, have meant greater weight which have required a larger launch vehicle. This would have added considerable cost to a project which was cancelled and reinstated several times.

Pluto is not the end of New Horizons' mission. It is hoped that it will go on to make flybys of at least 2 (as yet unidentified) Kuiper Belt Objects between 2016 and 2020.

Barek Halfhand

Apr 1 2007, 07:00 PM

QUOTE(Waspie_Dwarf @ Mar 30 2007, 09:30 PM) [snapback]1606937[/snapback]

Kuiper Belt Objects between 2016 and 2020:

......that is going to be cool.....B

Waspie_Dwarf

Apr 2 2007, 06:40 PM

Two Moons Meet over Jupiter

This beautiful image of the crescents of volcanic Io and more sedate Europa was snapped by New Horizons' color Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) at 10:34 UT on March 2, 2007, about two days after New Horizons made its closest approach to Jupiter.

The picture was one of a handful of the Jupiter system that New Horizons took primarily for their artistic, rather than scientific value. This particular scene was suggested by space enthusiast Richard Hendricks of Austin, Texas, in response to an Internet request by New Horizons scientists for evocative, artistic imaging opportunities at Jupiter.

This image was taken from a range of 4.6 million kilometers (2.8 million miles) from Io and 3.8 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Europa. Although the moons appear close in this view, a gulf of 790,000 kilometers (490,000 miles) separates them. The night side of Io is illuminated here by light reflected from Jupiter, which is out of the frame to the right. Europa's night side is completely dark, in contrast to Io, because that side of Europa faces away from Jupiter.

Here, Io steals the show with its beautiful display of volcanic activity. Three volcanic plumes are visible. Most conspicuous is the enormous 300-kilometer (190-mile) -high plume from the Tvashtar volcano at the 11 o'clock position on Io's disk. Two much smaller plumes are barely visible: one from the volcano Prometheus, at the 9 o'clock position on the edge of Io's disk, and one from the volcano Amirani, seen between Prometheus and Tvashtar along Io's terminator (the line dividing day and night). The plumes appear blue because of the scattering of light by tiny dust particles ejected by the volcanoes, similar to the blue appearance of smoke. In addition, the contrasting red glow of hot lava can be seen at the source of the Tvashtar plume.

The images are centered at 1 degree north, 60 degrees west on Io, and 0 degrees north, 149 degrees west on Europa. The color in this image was generated using individual MVIC images at wavelengths of 480, 620 and 850 nanometers. The human eye is sensitive to slightly shorter wavelengths, from 400 to 700 nanometers, and thus would see the scene slightly differently. For instance, while the eye would notice the difference between the yellow and reddish brown colors of Io's surface and the paler color of Europa, the two worlds appear very similar in color to MVIC's longer-wavelength vision. The night side of Io appears greenish compared to the day side, because methane in Jupiter's atmosphere absorbs 850-nanometer light and makes Jupiter-light green to MVIC's "eyes."
MVIC is a component of the Ralph imaging instrumen.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Barek Halfhand

Apr 4 2007, 06:52 PM

QUOTE(Waspie_Dwarf @ Apr 2 2007, 01:40 PM) [snapback]1610114[/snapback]

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

.... BIG credit JHU!...that picture is amazing!!

.......B

Waspie_Dwarf

Apr 5 2007, 04:13 PM

Capturing Callisto

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) captured these two images of Jupiter's outermost large moon, Callisto, as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter in late February. New Horizons' closest approach distance to Jupiter was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles), not far outside Callisto's orbit, which has a radius of 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles). However, Callisto happened to be on the opposite side of Jupiter during the spacecraft's pass through the Jupiter system, so these images, taken from 4.7 million kilometers (3.0 million miles) and 4.2 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) away, are the closest of Callisto that New Horizons obtained.

Callisto's ancient, crater-scarred surface makes it very different from its three more active sibling satellites, Io, Europa and Ganymede. Callisto, 4,800 kilometers (3000 miles) in diameter, displays no large-scale geological features other than impact craters, and every bright spot in these images is a crater. The largest impact feature on Callisto, the huge basin Valhalla, is visible as a bright patch at the 10 o'clock position. The craters are bright because they have excavated material relatively rich in water ice from beneath the dark, dusty material that coats most of the surface.

The two images show essentially the same side of Callisto - the side that faces Jupiter - under different illumination conditions. The images accompanied scans of Callisto's infrared spectrum with New Horizons' Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). The New Horizons science team designed these scans to study how the infrared spectrum of Callisto's water ice changes as lighting and viewing conditions change, and as the ice cools through Callisto's late afternoon. The infrared spectrum of water ice depends slightly on its temperature, and a goal of New Horizons when it reaches the Pluto system (in 2015) is to use the water ice features in the spectrum of Pluto's moon Charon, and perhaps on Pluto itself, to measure surface temperature. Callisto provided an ideal opportunity to test this technique on a much better-known body.

The left image, taken at 05:03 Universal Time on February 27, 2007, is centered at 5 degrees south, 5 degrees west, and has a solar phase angle of 46 degrees. The right image was taken at 03:25 Universal Time on February 28, 2007. It is centered at 4 degrees south, 356 degrees west, and has a solar phase angle of 76 degrees.

Released: April 5, 2007

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Apr 16 2007, 07:16 PM

The Colors of Night

The New Horizons Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) took this image of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io at 04:30 Universal Time on February 28, 2007, about one hour before New Horizons' closest approach to Jupiter, from a range of 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles). Part of the Ralph imaging instrument, MVIC is designed for the very faint solar illumination at Pluto, and is too sensitive to image the brightly lit daysides of Jupiter's moons. Io's dayside is therefore completely overexposed in this image, and appears white and featureless. However, the Jupiter-lit nightside of Io and the giant plume from the Tvashtar volcano are well exposed, and the versions of the image shown here have been processed to bring out each of these features.

The scale of the original image is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel; Io itself has a diameter of 3,630 kilometers (2,250 miles).

The nightside of Io (left panel) is illuminated brightly enough by Jupiter to reveal many details in full color to MVIC’s sensitive vision. The nightside color has been corrected to account for the greenish hue of Jupiter's light as seen by MVIC – April 2 Featured Image of Io and Europa – so the colors approximate what the human eye would see in daylight illumination. The image shows Io's reddish-brown polar areas and the yellow and white colors of its equatorial regions, mostly due to various forms of sulfur.

Several dark volcanic centers are also visible – the most prominent, appearing as an elongated spot just above and to the right of the disk’s center, is called Fjorgynn. Near the disk center, just over the night side of the terminator (the line separating day and night), is a row of three or four pale yellow patches, which likely are volcanic plumes catching the setting sun. These features have caught the attention of New Horizons scientists because no major plumes have been seen previously in this region of Io, and it is rare for Io's plumes to cluster so closely together.

The right panel shows the bluish color of the plume from Tvashtar, rising above the overexposed edge of Io's disk at the 11 o'clock position. The plume is blue because it contains fine dust that preferentially scatters blue light, in the same way that smoke appears blue. The red line on the edge of the disk, below the plume, is an artifact caused by the overexposure of Io's surface.

The image is centered at Io coordinates 26 degrees west, 6 degrees south, and is produced using MVIC's blue, red and near-infrared filters. In the original image, the overexposure of Io's dayside hemisphere caused extensive electronic “blooming” of the image toward the left and bottom edges of the frame, and this has been removed from the versions shown here.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Image posted: April 16, 2007

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Apr 25 2007, 10:21 PM

Headlines

April 25, 2007

NASA Science Update to Discuss Data from Jupiter Flyby

A NASA Science Update at 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 1, will discuss new views of the Jupiter system. The Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft is returning these images as it flies past the solar system's largest planet during the initial stages of a planned six-month encounter. The update, taking place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium in Washington, will air live on NASA Television and be streamed on the Web at www.nasa.gov.

New Horizons is using Jupiter's gravity to boost its speed toward the outer solar system while training its cameras and sensors on the giant planet and its moons.

Briefing participants are:

Alan Stern, NASA associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, and New Horizons principal investigator, Headquarters, Washington
Jeff Moore, New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team lead, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
John Spencer, New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team deputy lead, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.
Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.

Reporters at participating NASA centers will be able to ask questions. For more information about NASA TV, streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. For information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov.

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - News

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:28 PM

Pluto-Bound New Horizons Provides New Look at Jupiter System

05.01.07

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has provided new data on the Jupiter system, stunning scientists with never-before-seen perspectives of the giant planet's atmosphere, rings, moons and magnetosphere.

Image above: Image of the planet Jupiter's moon, Io, as seen by
the New Horizons spacecraft. A plume from a huge volcanic
eruption can be seen at the north pole of the moon. Click
image to enlarge.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

These new views include the closest look yet at the Earth-sized "Little Red Spot" storm churning materials through Jupiter's cloud tops; detailed images of small satellites herding dust and boulders through Jupiter's faint rings; and of volcanic eruptions and circular grooves on the planet's largest moons.

New Horizons came to within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28, using the planet's gravity to trim three years from its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth. About 70 percent of the expected 34 gigabits of data has come back so far, radioed to NASA's largest antennas over more than 600 million miles. This activity confirmed the successful testing of the instruments and operating software the spacecraft will use at Pluto.

"Aside from setting up our 2015 arrival at Pluto, the Jupiter flyby was a stress test of our spacecraft and team, and both passed with very high marks," said Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, NASA Headquarters, Washington. "We'll be analyzing this data for months to come; we have collected spectacular scientific products as well as evocative images."

Image above: This image of Io, one of Jupiter's moons, shows
the surface changes seen by New Horizons when compared with
the surface of Io seen by the Galileo spacecraft in 1999. Click
image to enlarge. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

Images include the first close-up scans of the Little Red Spot, Jupiter's second-largest storm, which formed when three smaller storms merged during the past decade. The storm, about half the size of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot and about 70 percent of Earth's diameter, began turning red about a year before New Horizons flew past it. Scientists will search for clues about how these systems form and why they change colors in their close observations of materials spinning within and around the nascent storm.

"This is our best look ever of a storm like this in its infancy," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. APL built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft. "Combined with data from telescopes on and around Earth taken at the same time New Horizons sped past Jupiter, we're getting an incredible look at the dynamics of weather on giant planets."

Under a range of lighting and viewing angles, New Horizons also grabbed the clearest images ever of the tenuous Jovian ring system. In them, scientists spotted a series of unexpected arcs and clumps of dust, indicative of a recent impact into the ring by a small object. Movies made from New Horizons images also provide an unprecedented look at ring dynamics, with the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea appearing to shepherd the materials around the rings.

Image above: New Horizons found evidence of a new eruption
taking place on Io in this image. Click image to enlarge.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

"We're starting to see that rings can evolve rapidly, with changes detectable during weeks and months," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Jupiter Encounter science team lead from NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We've seen similar phenomena in the rings of Saturn."

Of Jupiter's four largest moons, the team focused much attention on volcanic Io, the most geologically active body in the solar system. New Horizons' cameras captured pockets of bright, glowing lava scattered across the surface; dozens of small, glowing spots of gas; and several fortuitous views of a sunlit umbrella-shaped dust plume rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar, the best images yet of a giant eruption from the tortured volcanic moon.

The timing and location of the spacecraft's trajectory also allowed it to spy many of the mysterious, circular troughs carved onto the icy moon Europa. Data on the size, depth and distribution of these troughs, discovered by the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo mission, will help scientists determine the thickness of the ice shell that covers Europa's global ocean.

Image above: An image showing the Jupiter planetary/moon
system. Click image to enlarge.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

Already the fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons reached Jupiter 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in January 2006. The flyby added 9,000 miles per hour, pushing New Horizons past 50,000 miles per hour and setting up a flight by Pluto in July 2015.

The number of observations at Jupiter was twice that of those planned at Pluto. New Horizons made most of these observations during the spacecraft's closest approach to the planet, which was guided by more than 40,000 separate commands in the onboard computer.

"We can run simulations and take test images of stars, and learn that things would probably work fine at Pluto," said John Spencer, deputy lead of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "But having a planet to look at and lots of data to dig into tells us that the spacecraft and team can do all these amazing things. We might not have explored the full capabilities of the spacecraft if we didn't have this real planetary flyby to push the system and get our imaginations going."

More data are to come, as New Horizons completes its unprecedented flight down Jupiter's long magnetotail, where it will analyze the intensities of sun-charged particles that flow hundreds of millions of miles beyond the giant planet.

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program of medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. Stern leads the mission and science team as principal investigator; APL manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission team also includes Ball Aerospace Corp., Boulder, Colo; the Boeing Company, Chicago; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.;NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; KinetX, Inc., Simi Valley, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Corp.; Denver; University of Colorado, Boulder; the U.S. Department of Energy, Washington; and a number of other firms, NASA centers, and university partners.

Related Link: + Jupiter News Conference Image Gallery

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA - Missions - New Horizons - News

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:31 PM

Europa Rising

New Horizons took this image of the icy moon Europa rising above Jupiter’s cloud tops with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at 11:48 Universal Time on February 28, 2007, six hours after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Jupiter.

The picture was one of a handful of the Jupiter system that New Horizons took primarily for artistic, rather than scientific, value. This particular scene was suggested by space enthusiast Richard Hendricks of Austin, Texas, in response to an Internet request by New Horizons scientists for evocative, artistic imaging opportunities at Jupiter.

The spacecraft was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Jupiter and 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Europa when the picture was taken. Europa's diameter is 3,120 kilometers (1,939 miles). The image is centered on Europa coordinates 5 degrees south, 6 degrees west. In keeping with its artistic intent - and to provide a more dramatic perspective - the image has been rotated so south is at the top.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:38 PM

A "Plumefall" on Io

New Horizons took this image of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at 15:15 Universal Time on February 28, 2007, nearly 10 hours after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Jupiter. The image is centered at Io coordinates 5 degrees south, 92 degrees west, and the spacecraft was 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Io. Io's diameter is 3,640 kilometers (2,262 miles).

Io’s dayside was deliberately overexposed in this image to bring out details on the nightside and in any volcanic plumes that might be present. Io cooperated by producing an enormous plume, 330 kilometers (200 miles) high, from the volcano Tvashtar. Near Io's north pole, Tvashtar was active throughout New Horizons’ Jupiter encounter.

In this image, volcanic debris from the plume, illuminated by the setting sun, rains down onto Io's nightside. Hot, glowing lava at the source of the plume is the bright point of light on the sunlit side of the terminator (the line separating day and night). Elsewhere along the terminator, mountains catch the setting sun. The nightside of Io is lit up by light reflected from Jupiter.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:45 PM

Tvashtar Composite

Variations in the appearance of the giant plume from the Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter's moon Io are seen in this composite of the best photos taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) during its Jupiter flyby in late February-early March 2007.

New Horizons was fortunate to witness this unusually large plume during its brief Jupiter flyby; the Galileo Jupiter orbiter spent more than five years imaging the volcanic moon (between 1996 and 2001) without ever capturing such detailed pictures of a large Io plume. The plume is roughly 330 kilometers (200 miles) high. The cause of the fine wispy structure in the plume, which varies strikingly from image to image, is unknown, but these pictures may help scientists to understand the phenomenon.

The pictures were taken at distances ranging from 3.1 to 2.3 million kilometers (1.9 to 1.4 million miles), but they have been scaled to show the plume at the same relative size in every frame. Illumination conditions also vary: in the final image, Io's shadow cuts across the plume and hides all but its topmost regions, and the glow of hot lava can be seen on the nightside at the source of the plume. The times of the images, from top to bottom, are: February 26, 18:38 (Universal Time); February 26, 21:01; February 28, 03:50; February 28, 04:40; February 28, 11:04; and March 1, 00:35.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:48 PM

Io Through Different 'Eyes'

This montage demonstrates New Horizons' ability to observe the same target in complementary ways using its diverse suite of instruments. Previously released views taken at visible and slightly longer infrared wavelengths with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), New Horizons’ high-resolution black-and-white camera, and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), its color camera, are here compared with a nearly simultaneous view from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), which observes its targets in more than 200 separate wavelengths of infrared light. This color LEISA view of Io (bottom right) combines three wavelength ranges, centered at 1.80, 2.04, and 2.31 micrometers.

The LORRI image (left) shows fine details on Io's sunlit crescent and in the partially sunlit plume from the Tvashtar volcano, and reveals the bright nighttime glow of the hot lavas at the source of the Tvashtar plume. The MVIC image (top right) shows the contrasting colors of the red lava and blue plume at Tvashtar, and the sulfur and sulfur dioxide deposits on Io's sunlit surface. The LEISA image shows that the glow of the Tvashtar volcano is even more intense at infrared wavelengths and reveals the infrared glow of at least 10 fainter volcanic hot spots on the moon’s nightside. The brightest of these, Amirani/Maui, which is visible to the lower right of Tvashtar, is less than 4% as bright as Tvashtar. All of these are long-lived hot spots that have been observed previously by the Galileo orbiter. Further analysis of the LEISA data will provide information on the volcanoes’ temperatures, and data on the sunlit crescent of Io will reveal details of Io's surface composition.

The LORRI, MVIC and LEISA images were taken March 1, 2007, at 00:35, 00:25 and 00:31 Universal Time, respectively, from a range of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). The images are centered at Io coordinates 4 degrees south, 164 degrees west.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:50 PM

Ganymede in Visible and Infrared Light

This montage compares New Horizons' best views of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, gathered with the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and its infrared spectrometer, the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA).

LEISA observes its targets in more than 200 separate wavelengths of infrared light, allowing detailed analysis of their surface composition. The LEISA image shown here combines just three of these wavelengths - 1.3, 1.8 and 2.0 micrometers - to highlight differences in composition across Ganymede's surface. Blue colors represent relatively clean water ice, while brown colors show regions contaminated by dark material.

The right panel combines the high-resolution grayscale LORRI image with the color-coded compositional information from the LEISA image, producing a picture that combines the best of both data sets.

The LEISA and LORRI images were taken at 9:48 and 10:01 Universal Time, respectively, on February 27, 2007, from a range of 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles). The longitude of the disk center is 38 degrees west. With a diameter of 5,268 kilometers (3,273 miles), Ganymede is the largest satellite in the solar system.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:54 PM

Io Surface Changes

This montage compares similar sides of Io photographed by the Galileo spacecraft in October 1999 (left) and the New Horizons spacecraft on February 27, 2007. The New Horizons image was taken with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from a range of 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles).

Most features on Io have changed little in the seven-plus years between these images, despite continued intense volcanic activity. The largest visible feature is the dark oval composed of deposits from the Pele volcano, nearly 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) across its longest dimension. At high northern latitudes, the volcano Dazhbog is prominent as a dark spot in the New Horizons image, near the edge of the disk at the 11 o'clock position. This volcano is much less conspicuous in the Galileo image. This darkening happened after this 1999 Galileo image but before Galileo took its last images of Io in 2001.

A more recent change, discovered by New Horizons, can be seen in the southern hemisphere (circled). A new volcanic eruption near 55 degrees south, 290 degrees west has created a roughly circular deposit nearly 500 kilometers (300 miles) in diameter that was not seen by Galileo. Other New Horizons images show that the plume that created this deposit is still active.

The New Horizons image is centered at Io coordinates 8 degrees south, 269 degrees west.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 08:57 PM

Io in Eclipse

This unusual image shows Io glowing in the darkness of Jupiter's shadow. It is a combination of eight images taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) between 14:25 and 14:55 Universal Time on February 27, 2007, about 15 hours before the spacecraft's closest approach to Jupiter. North is at the top of the image.

Io's surface is invisible in the darkness, but the image reveals glowing hot lava, auroral displays in Io's tenuous atmosphere and volcanic plumes across the moon. The three bright points of light on the right side of Io are incandescent lava at active volcanoes - Pele and Reiden (south of the equator), and a previously unknown volcano near 22 degrees north, 233 degrees west near the edge of the disk at the 2 o'clock position.

An auroral glow, produced as intense radiation from Jupiter's magnetosphere bombards Io’s atmosphere, outlines the edge of the moon’s disk. The glow is patchy because the atmosphere itself is patchy, being denser over active volcanoes. In addition to the near-surface glow, there is a remarkable auroral glow suspended 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the edge of the disk at the 2 o'clock position; perhaps this glowing gas was ejected from the new volcano below it. Another glowing gas plume, above a fainter point of light, is visible just inside Io's disk near the 6 o'clock position; this plume is above another new volcanic eruption discovered by New Horizons.

On the left side of the disk, near Io's equator, a cluster of faint dots of light is centered near the point on Io that always faces Jupiter. This is the region where electrical currents connect Io to Jupiter's magnetosphere. It is likely that electrical connections to individual volcanoes are causing the glows seen here, though the details are mysterious.

Total exposure time for this image was 16 seconds. The range to Io was 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles), and the image is centered at Io coordinates 7 degrees south, 306 degrees west. The image has been heavily processed to remove scattered light from Jupiter, but some artifacts remain, such as dark patches in the background.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 09:00 PM

Jupiter's Moons: Family Portrait

This montage shows the best views of Jupiter's four large and diverse "Galilean" satellites as seen by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter in late February 2007. The four moons are, from left to right: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The images have been scaled to represent the true relative sizes of the four moons and are arranged in their order from Jupiter.

Io, 3,640 kilometers (2,260 miles) in diameter, was imaged at 03:50 Universal Time on February 28 from a range of 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles). The original image scale was 13 kilometers per pixel, and the image is centered at Io coordinates 6 degrees south, 22 degrees west. Io is notable for its active volcanism, which New Horizons has studied extensively.

Europa, 3,120 kilometers (1,938 miles) in diameter, was imaged at 01:28 Universal Time on February 28 from a range of 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles). The original image scale was 15 kilometers per pixel, and the image is centered at Europa coordinates 6 degrees south, 347 degrees west. Europa's smooth, icy surface likely conceals an ocean of liquid water. New Horizons obtained data on Europa’s surface composition and imaged subtle surface features, and analysis of these data may provide new information about the ocean and the icy shell that covers it.

New Horizons spied Ganymede, 5,262 kilometers (3,268 miles) in diameter, at 10:01 Universal Time on February 27 from 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) away. The original scale was 17 kilometers per pixel, and the image is centered at Ganymede coordinates 6 degrees south, 38 degrees west. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, has a dirty ice surface cut by fractures and peppered by impact craters. New Horizons’ infrared observations may provide insight into the composition of the moon’s surface and interior.

Callisto, 4,820 kilometers (2,995 miles) in diameter, was imaged at 03:50 Universal Time on February 28 from a range of 4.2 million kilometers (2.6 million miles). The original image scale was 21 kilometers per pixel, and the image is centered at Callisto coordinates 4 degrees south, 356 degrees west. Scientists are using the infrared spectra New Horizons gathered of Callisto’s ancient, cratered surface to calibrate spectral analysis techniques that will help them to understand the surfaces of Pluto and its moon Charon when New Horizons passes them in 2015.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 09:02 PM

Jupiter's Rings: Sharpest View

The New Horizons spacecraft took the best images of Jupiter’s charcoal-black rings as it approached and then looked back at Jupiter. The top image was taken on approach, showing three well-defined lanes of gravel- to boulder-sized material composing the bulk of the rings, as well as lesser amounts of material between the rings. New Horizons snapped the lower image after it had passed Jupiter on February 28, 2007, and looked back in a direction toward the sun. The image is sharply focused, though it appears fuzzy due to the cloud of dust-sized particles enveloping the rings. The dust is brightly illuminated in the same way the dust on a dirty windshield lights up when you drive toward a “low” sun. The narrow rings are confined in their orbits by small “shepherding” moons.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 09:05 PM

Best Color Image of Jupiter's Little Red Spot

This amazing color portrait of Jupiter’s “Little Red Spot” (LRS) combines high-resolution images from the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken at 03:12 UT on February 27, 2007, with color images taken nearly simultaneously by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The LORRI images provide details as fine as 9 miles across (15 kilometers), which is approximately 10 times better than Hubble can provide on its own. The improved resolution is possible because New Horizons was only 1.9 million miles (3 million kilometers) away from Jupiter when LORRI snapped its pictures, while Hubble was more than 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) away from the Gas Giant planet.

The Little Red Spot is the second largest storm on Jupiter, roughly 70% the size of the Earth, and it started turning red in late-2005. The clouds in the Little Red Spot rotate counterclockwise, or in the anticyclonic direction, because it is a high-pressure region. In that sense, the Little Red Spot is the opposite of a hurricane on Earth, which is a low-pressure region – and, of course, the Little Red Spot is far larger than any hurricane on Earth.

Scientists don't know exactly how or why the Little Red Spot turned red, though they speculate that the change could stem from a surge of exotic compounds from deep within Jupiter, caused by an intensification of the storm system. In particular, sulfur-bearing cloud droplets might have been propelled about 50 kilometers into the upper level of ammonia clouds, where brighter sunlight bathing the cloud tops released the red-hued sulfur embedded in the droplets, causing the storm to turn red. A similar mechanism has been proposed for the Little Red Spot's "older brother," the Great Red Spot, a massive energetic storm system that has persisted for over a century.

New Horizons is providing an opportunity to examine an “infant” red storm system in detail, which may help scientists understand better how these giant weather patterns form and evolve.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 09:06 PM

Probing Storm Activity on Jupiter

Scientists assume Jupiter’s clouds are composed primarily of ammonia, but only about 1% of the cloud area displays the characteristic spectral fingerprint of ammonia. This composite of infrared images taken by the New Horizons Linear Etalon Infrared Spectral Imager (LEISA) captures several eruptions of this relatively rare breed of ammonia cloud and follows the evolution of the clouds over two Jovian days. (One day on Jupiter is approximately 10 hours, which is how long it takes Jupiter to make one complete rotation about its axis.)

The New Horizons spacecraft was still closing in on the giant planet when it made these observations: Jupiter was 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from the New Horizons spacecraft for the LEISA image taken at 19:35 Universal Time on February 26, 2007, and the distance decreased to 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) for the last image shown. LEISA’s spatial resolution scale varied from approximately 210 kilometers (130 miles) for the first image to 160 kilometers (100 miles) for the last one.

New Horizons scientists originally targeted the region slightly northwest (up and to the left) of the Great Red Spot to search for these special ammonia clouds because that’s where they were most easily seen during infrared spectral observations made by the Galileo spacecraft. But unlike the churning, turbulent cloud structures seen near the Great Red Spot during the Galileo era, this region has been quieting down during the past several months and was unusually tranquil when New Horizons passed by. Nevertheless, LEISA managed to find other regions of fresh, upwelling ammonia clouds, and the temporal evolution of one such region is displayed in this figure. In the first image, a fresh ammonia cloud (the blue region) sprouts from between white clouds and a dark elongated region. This blue cloud subsequently stretches along the white-dark border in the next two images.

These fresh ammonia clouds trace the strong upwelling of gases from the largely hidden depths of Jupiter to higher altitudes. Presumably, water is also being dragged up from below, and the subsequent condensation of that water, which is far more abundant than ammonia in Jupiter’s atmosphere, into cloud droplets energizes the lower troposphere.

LEISA produces images at infrared wavelengths, which is heat radiation that cannot be sensed by the human eye. These “false color” images were produced by putting images of Jupiter at wavelengths of 1.99 micrometers, 1.94 micrometers and 2.04 micrometers into the red, green and blue channels, respectively, of the image display. Ammonia has an absorption feature at 1.94 micrometers, and when the colors are combined in this way the fresh ammonia clouds take on a bluish hue.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 1 2007, 09:07 PM

Jupiter's High-Altitude Clouds

The New Horizons Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) snapped this incredibly detailed picture of Jupiter’s high-altitude clouds starting at 06:00 Universal Time on February 28, 2007, when the spacecraft was only 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from the solar system’s largest planet. Features as small as 50 kilometers (30 miles) are visible. The image was taken through a narrow filter centered on a methane absorption band near 890 nanometers, a considerably redder wavelength than what the eye can see. Images taken through this filter preferentially pick out clouds that are relatively high in the sky of this gas giant planet because sunlight at the wavelengths transmitted by the filter is completely absorbed by the methane gas that permeates Jupiter’s atmosphere before it can reach the lower clouds.

The image reveals a range of diverse features. The south pole is capped with a haze of small particles probably created by the precipitation of charged particles into the polar regions during auroral activity. Just north of the cap is a well-formed anticyclonic vortex with rising white thunderheads at its core. Slightly north of the vortex are the tendrils of some rather disorganized storms and more pinpoint-like thunderheads. The dark “measles” that appear a bit farther north are actually cloud-free regions where light is completely absorbed by the methane gas and essentially disappears from view. The wind action considerably picks up in the equatorial regions where giant plumes are stretched into a long wave pattern. Proceeding north of the equator, cirrus-like clouds are shredded by winds reaching speeds of up to 400 miles per hour, and more pinpoint-like thunderheads are visible. Although some of the famous belt and zone structure of Jupiter’s atmosphere is washed out when viewed at this wavelength, the relatively thin North Temperate Belt shows up quite nicely, as does a series of waves just north of the belt. The north polar region of Jupiter in this image has a mottled appearance, and the scene is not as dynamic as the equatorial and south polar regions.

The intricate structures revealed in this image are exciting, but they are only part of the story. The New Horizons instruments have taken images of Jupiter at approximately 260 different wavelengths, providing essentially a three-dimensional view of Jupiter’s atmosphere, since images at different wavelengths probe different altitudes. New Horizons is providing a wealth of data on this fascinating planet during this last close-up view of Jupiter until the middle of the next decade.

Release Date: May 1, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

May 10 2007, 08:45 PM

Continuing Our Jovian Journey

May 10, 2007

This will be a short update, but I didn’t want you to think we’ve folded our tent at Jupiter yet. The image illustration above is amazing, isn’t it? If you haven’t been to Jupiter yourself, I think now you can say you almost have been!

New Horizons is now beyond 6 astronomical units from the Sun and about 1 AU from Jupiter, which is, of course, moving too. We continue to transmit data from close-approach observations made in late February and early March. As of late this week, we have 80% of the mother lode from Jupiter here in computers on terra firma.

We also continue to take data as we fly down the Jovian magnetotail. Our Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) and Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) teams are discovering structures in the tail they never dreamed of, including some fascinating periodicities and sulfur ions that originated as neutral sulfur back at the volcanic moon Io. You’ll hear more about this exciting exploration when those teams figure out what it all means.

A ‘Kodak’ for Kubrick: Photo illustration of
the moon Europa rising over Jupiter’s limb, as
seen from the LORRI panchromatic imager
aboard New Horizons, with color and stars
courtesy of space enthusiast Simon Jenks from
San Antonio, Texas.

(Click on the image to view for larger version.)

Meanwhile, our spacecraft team is conducting a series of tests to ready us for our first stint of hibernation, which begins at the June-July boundary. We must update our autonomy/fault protection software to ready it for hibernating through most of July and August, before we wake up the bird for instrument calibrations. The team is also carrying out various spacecraft propulsion and other subsystem tests and some further instrument calibrations.

And while the spacecraft team is busy with hibernation preps, our science team is closing in on a decision about which day in mid-July 2015 we want to arrive at Pluto. We had planned on July 14, but decided to look at surrounding dates for potential, additional science opportunities at Pluto. Considerations range from what terrain we see best on Pluto (each day is different as Pluto rotates over 6.4 days), to where Charon is located relative to Pluto, and where Nix and Hydra will be as well. We plan to make a final decision at a full science team meeting on May 30-31. I’ll let you know what we decide, but I can tell you that after a close look, July 14 is still an awfully good choice. If we move off July 14, we’ll execute a burn this fall to change our speed by 3 to perhaps 30 meters per second (depending on how many days we move the date).

Well, that’s all I wanted to tell you about this time. I’ll be back with more news soon. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we do.
- Alan Stern

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons

Barek Halfhand

May 11 2007, 11:28 AM

QUOTE(Waspie_Dwarf @ May 10 2007, 03:45 PM) [snapback]1669090[/snapback]

We continue to transmit data from close-approach observations made in late February and early March. As of late this week, we have 80% of the mother lode from Jupiter here in computers on terra firma.

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons

that means much more data and images from the flyby to come I hope.....B

Waspie_Dwarf

May 15 2007, 03:18 AM

Tvashtar in Motion

This five-frame sequence of New Horizons images captures the giant plume from Io's Tvashtar volcano. Snapped by the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever “movie” of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon’s surface. Only the upper part of the plume is visible from this vantage point – the plume’s source is 130 kilometers (80 miles) below the edge of Io's disk, on the far side of the moon.

The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale. The knots and filaments that allow us to track the plume’s motion are still mysterious, but this movie is likely to help scientists understand their origin, as well as provide unique information on the plume dynamics.

Io's hyperactive nature is emphasized by the fact that two other volcanic plumes are also visible off the edge of Io's disk: Masubi at the 7 o'clock position, and a very faint plume, possibly from the volcano Zal, at the 10 o'clock position. Jupiter illuminates the night side of Io, and the most prominent feature visible on the disk is the dark horseshoe shape of the volcano Loki, likely an enormous lava lake. Boosaule Mons, which at 18 kilometers (11 miles) is the highest mountain on Io and one of the highest mountains in the solar system, pokes above the edge of the disk on the right side.

The five images were obtained over an 8-minute span, with two minutes between frames, from 23:50 to 23:58 Universal Time on March 1, 2007. Io was 3.8 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from New Horizons; the image is centered at Io coordinates 0 degrees north, 342 degrees west.

The pictures were part of a sequence designed to look at Jupiter's rings, but planners included Io in the sequence because the moon was passing behind Jupiter's rings at the time.

Release Date: May 14, 2007

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Source: NASA/JHUPL - New Horizons - Mission Photos

Waspie_Dwarf

Jun 1 2007, 09:41 PM

June 1, 2007
Full Set of Jupiter Close-Approach Data Reaches Home

Like countless others before it, the data packet rode a radio signal more than 500 million miles from the New Horizons spacecraft to Earth, filtering through NASA’s largest antennas late last week to mission and science operations center computers in Maryland and Colorado.

But this particular data – infrared scans of Jupiter’s day-night boundary – were special for another reason: they were the last to be sent to Earth from the New Horizons Jupiter flyby, which took place in February and March.

“All of the data from our Jupiter close-approach encounter is on the ground,” says mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. “The data are better and richer than we ever expected. The Jupiter system is spectacular and New Horizons performed superbly to observe it. Our team couldn’t be happier.”

The dataset – about 36 gigabits, gathered from Feb. 24-March 7 and stored on the spacecraft’s digital recorders – includes the bulk of New Horizons’ 700-plus observations of Jupiter’s atmosphere, rings and closest moons. Mission scientists have been poring through these images and spectral measurements since the spacecraft began transmitting them, and are reviewing the early results of this work at a New Horizons science team meeting this week in Boulder, Colo.

“From the first close-up look at the Little Red Spot storm, to the best views ever of Jupiter’s rings, to sequences of a volcanic eruption on the Jovian moon Io, we’ve seen some amazing things,” says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel,