New Horizons is back to sending photos home
September 12, 2015 7:25 AM Subscribe
Sure, you marveled at the first close up photos of Pluto that the New Horizons spacecraft captured as it soared past the planet. But that was only about 5% of the total photo set. Starting now, the spacecraft will be sending home everything.
Note, originally we were going to compressed versions of the images, from Sept through November, but after seeing the JPEG artifacts, the team has decided to do the uncompressed download, which will take about a year total. The raw image feed is here.
Note, originally we were going to compressed versions of the images, from Sept through November, but after seeing the JPEG artifacts, the team has decided to do the uncompressed download, which will take about a year total. The raw image feed is here.
My mom thinks space exploration is a waste of taxpayers' money and blahblahblah conservative talking points.
Uh, that is a Leftist talking point, thank you very much.
And she's right.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:06 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
Uh, that is a Leftist talking point, thank you very much.
And she's right.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:06 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
I for one am impressed by the telemetry challenges and solutions for sending hi-res pics over such vast distances. Can anyone here suggest web places where I can learn more about this in particular?
Talking to Pluto is hard! Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:08 AM on September 12, 2015 [7 favorites]
The spacecraft's radio transmitter's power output is 12 watts. Twelve watts. The ham radio in my car puts out 50 watts.
posted by neuron at 8:10 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by neuron at 8:10 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's like they still only have dial-up out around Pluto.
For reference, here's the best imagery we had of Pluto pre-New Horizons.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:26 AM on September 12, 2015 [9 favorites]
For reference, here's the best imagery we had of Pluto pre-New Horizons.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:26 AM on September 12, 2015 [9 favorites]
Are these details new enough that we can start naming stuff? If so, here's mine.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:45 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Drinky Die at 8:45 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
ZenMasterThis: You would probably enjoy reading The Interstellar Age. It's a bit broader than what you're looking for but it gave me Apollo-Level respect for the scientists and engineers behind these probes.
posted by Brodiggitty at 8:58 AM on September 12, 2015
posted by Brodiggitty at 8:58 AM on September 12, 2015
The Nov 1986 issue of Scientific American has a great article about Voyager 2 and the problems encountered in transmitting from Neptune's orbit. IIRC their data buffer is an 8-track tape.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:11 AM on September 12, 2015
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:11 AM on September 12, 2015
It's like they still only have dial-up out around Pluto.
Well, that depends on your age, I guess - do you remember 56k (56 kilobits per second) modems? 14.4k modems? Does your memory go all the way back to 9600 bits per second in 1984?
These guys are getting about 1000 bits per second, about a factor of 10 slower than the earliest popular dial-up. And that's using some of the largest radio telescopes in the world to listen for the faint whisper. It's pretty amazing stuff!
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:06 AM on September 12, 2015 [8 favorites]
Well, that depends on your age, I guess - do you remember 56k (56 kilobits per second) modems? 14.4k modems? Does your memory go all the way back to 9600 bits per second in 1984?
These guys are getting about 1000 bits per second, about a factor of 10 slower than the earliest popular dial-up. And that's using some of the largest radio telescopes in the world to listen for the faint whisper. It's pretty amazing stuff!
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:06 AM on September 12, 2015 [8 favorites]
Good point, RedOrGreen. It is amazing.
(Though thanks for reminding me how old I am. In high school we had remotely connected terminals — that's pre-dial-up — that ran at 300 baud, which was roughly 10 characters per second, which was, much to our irritation, slower than most people can read.)
posted by benito.strauss at 10:24 AM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
(Though thanks for reminding me how old I am. In high school we had remotely connected terminals — that's pre-dial-up — that ran at 300 baud, which was roughly 10 characters per second, which was, much to our irritation, slower than most people can read.)
posted by benito.strauss at 10:24 AM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
9600? You got 9600! I remember 1200 and even 800. The modem was the size of a briefcase. (I also had to walk 10 miles to work in the snow and the dark.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:47 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:47 AM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
Excuse my ignorance but how lit up is Pluto? Given how far away it is, how bright is the surface from sunlight? I can't imagine flash photography. Is the camera super fast? I suppose long exposures make no sense.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:10 AM on September 12, 2015
posted by njohnson23 at 11:10 AM on September 12, 2015
As for exposure times, it looks like they are uniformly 150 milliseconds for the photos coming in now -- so long but not extraordinarily so.
Astronomical CCDs like those used in the Ralph camera have much lower noise than those used in digital cameras -- the equivalent of only a few photons in terms of detector counts -- and a high rate of conversion of incoming photons to the electrons that get counted (frequently >50%). As a result, even a couple of dozen photons per pixel are sufficient for making an image.
posted by janewman at 11:31 AM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]
Astronomical CCDs like those used in the Ralph camera have much lower noise than those used in digital cameras -- the equivalent of only a few photons in terms of detector counts -- and a high rate of conversion of incoming photons to the electrons that get counted (frequently >50%). As a result, even a couple of dozen photons per pixel are sufficient for making an image.
posted by janewman at 11:31 AM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]
Just noticed -- the linked image feed is actually from a different instrument from the one described in the article, LORRI rather than Ralph. It uses CCDs too, though (in LORRI's case, there's a larger telescope collecting photons to help make up for the low intensity of light -- 8 inches in diameter instead of 2.4).
posted by janewman at 11:41 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by janewman at 11:41 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
9600? You got 9600! I remember 1200 and even 800
I remember the luxury of running vi over a 300 baud modem from my kaypro 2. Slow, yes, but it beat driving onto campus for making little changes.
posted by DarkForest at 11:45 AM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
I remember the luxury of running vi over a 300 baud modem from my kaypro 2. Slow, yes, but it beat driving onto campus for making little changes.
posted by DarkForest at 11:45 AM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
Oh, and then there was that one time I was trapped in a black hole and all I had was a cosmic string that I could use to manipulate the second hand on a old watch and send back data that could be used to save the human race from extinction. Hoo boy, that was a heck of a thing!
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:16 PM on September 12, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:16 PM on September 12, 2015 [9 favorites]
So when I mow the lawn in Iowa, and get bitten half to death by some bugs or something that have crawled up my trouser leg and got at me several times in the same region, several days later it looks uncannily like this.
I'm not sure what that means.
posted by Wordshore at 2:15 PM on September 12, 2015
I'm not sure what that means.
posted by Wordshore at 2:15 PM on September 12, 2015
Neuron - but it probably has a slightly more gainey antenna. I did have a friend who did moonbounce mobile with unfeasibly big stacked Yagis on the back of his pickup (driving to the top of a mountain can make all the difference), but he was a bit weird. Even by ham radio standards.
For me, the fact that we can throw an object into the Kuiper Belt and keep talking to it is amazing, true, but it's equally amazing that we can do it pretty well on demand. The radio engineering is terrific, but it's standard issue (especially compared to the stuff redorgreen gets to play with). You may have to get very creative post-launch (Galileo basically lost its main antenna, Cassini/Huygens got set up accidentally on different channels, Voyager II had a capacitor fail in its receiver that left it wandering around the dial) but basically, deep space comms? Got it.
I have an entirely pathological love of radio, and part of me is a bit sad that it's so well understood and our engineering is so good - had I been born sixty or seventy years earlier, I could have lived through some wonderful discoveries and perhaps been part of some of them. But then I look at the pictures coming back from New Horizons and, hey, I'll live with it.
posted by Devonian at 3:00 PM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
For me, the fact that we can throw an object into the Kuiper Belt and keep talking to it is amazing, true, but it's equally amazing that we can do it pretty well on demand. The radio engineering is terrific, but it's standard issue (especially compared to the stuff redorgreen gets to play with). You may have to get very creative post-launch (Galileo basically lost its main antenna, Cassini/Huygens got set up accidentally on different channels, Voyager II had a capacitor fail in its receiver that left it wandering around the dial) but basically, deep space comms? Got it.
I have an entirely pathological love of radio, and part of me is a bit sad that it's so well understood and our engineering is so good - had I been born sixty or seventy years earlier, I could have lived through some wonderful discoveries and perhaps been part of some of them. But then I look at the pictures coming back from New Horizons and, hey, I'll live with it.
posted by Devonian at 3:00 PM on September 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
The first thing that jumps out is an absence of craters, even with more of the Sputnik Planum to scour. Based on normal cratering rates, that dates the plains to being recently surfaced within the last 100 million years. For context, that’s younger than Appalachian Mountains. To be craterless, Pluto has to-be-determined active geologic processes resurfacing the world in the recent past. This is hugely unexpected. (Really: it left me flailing).
posted by bukvich at 3:01 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by bukvich at 3:01 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
Excuse my ignorance but how lit up is Pluto?
With the sun directly overhead, it's about as bright as Earth immediately before sunrise or after sunset. You can calculate your local "Pluto Time" here.
posted by Hatashran at 5:20 PM on September 12, 2015
With the sun directly overhead, it's about as bright as Earth immediately before sunrise or after sunset. You can calculate your local "Pluto Time" here.
posted by Hatashran at 5:20 PM on September 12, 2015
From bukvich's linked article, "The Icy Peaks of Norgay Montes".
'Dammit, who let Tolkien on the naming committee?'
posted by benito.strauss at 5:28 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
'Dammit, who let Tolkien on the naming committee?'
posted by benito.strauss at 5:28 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
With the sun directly overhead, it's about as bright as Earth immediately before sunrise or after sunset.
That's WAY brighter than I expected. I assumed the Sun was just a brighter star in the sky for everything further out than Jupiter.
posted by 3urypteris at 11:51 PM on September 12, 2015
That's WAY brighter than I expected. I assumed the Sun was just a brighter star in the sky for everything further out than Jupiter.
posted by 3urypteris at 11:51 PM on September 12, 2015
item: "My mom thinks space exploration is a waste of taxpayers' money and blahblahblah conservative talking points. My mom can suck it, though, because this shit is awesome."
New Horizons cost about $650 million total. Give me your mom's address and I'll mail her two bucks. She can keep the change.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:35 PM on September 13, 2015 [4 favorites]
New Horizons cost about $650 million total. Give me your mom's address and I'll mail her two bucks. She can keep the change.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:35 PM on September 13, 2015 [4 favorites]
Metafilter: Give me your mom's address and I'll mail her two bucks. She can keep the change.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:39 PM on September 13, 2015
posted by Drinky Die at 9:39 PM on September 13, 2015
Astronomical CCDs like those used in the Ralph camera have much lower noise than those used in digital cameras...
Not to mention that, way out there, they're probably really, really cold, which should help with the noise.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:26 AM on September 14, 2015
Not to mention that, way out there, they're probably really, really cold, which should help with the noise.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:26 AM on September 14, 2015
These images are amazing. Thanks for posting.
From bukvich's link:
A geologically active Pluto breaks our theories of activity on icy worlds. We thought the only way to get that kind of geological activity was tidal massage from a friendly neighbourhood gas giant.
Amazing in that there's this activity. I also just like the phrase "tidal massage from a friendly gas giant."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
From bukvich's link:
A geologically active Pluto breaks our theories of activity on icy worlds. We thought the only way to get that kind of geological activity was tidal massage from a friendly neighbourhood gas giant.
Amazing in that there's this activity. I also just like the phrase "tidal massage from a friendly gas giant."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:02 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Is that not incredible? Maddening that we probably won't send another probe there in our lifetimes.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:53 AM on September 18, 2015
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:53 AM on September 18, 2015
And she's right.
No, actually, item is right, she's wrong. Space is 100 miles above us. That's all it is to low-earth orbit (LEO). And solving for space–getting up there, living out there–is pretty much the only serious proposition that in pursuing will result in solutions to all the challenges we face here on earth today.
Ecology, sustainability, health, inclusion, and (of course) energy. Making space easily accessible and attainable solves for all those challenges. Running out of space? No problem. Running out of resources to the detriment of human life and much of the planet? No problem. just figure out the secret of easily going up 100 miles up and (quoting Robert Heinlein) "you are are halfway to anywhere in the solar system." And the solar system has everything.
In fact, staying here on earth is the only was to guarantee failing. And by failing I mean using and abusing our resources and environment until it is irreparably harmed.
Yet make no mistake: In solving for space, we promote solution-finding which enables the technology and science necessary for solving every challenge we face on earth today in ways that no other approach can. And as a full-time space STEM educator I share this with students inside and outside the US everyday. Where are the answers to our predicament? They are found 100 miles straight up. Our job is to get to them.
And speaking to your point, Sys Rq (ie the one made by Gil-Scott Heron's Whitey on the Moon), know that inclusion and equality are essential component's necessary to make space exploration work. The song and the point you make has to do with an absence of inclusion and equality in our day-to-day lives, and of the reality of scarcity and disparity, and of space adding to not reducing this condition. But that is no longer the case. (In some sense, it certainly was/has been.) Space in its modern form solves for that. We are insuring this. How do I know? Because I'm one of the people working on space today, people who care and are bringing these motives to space exploration, and we are making sure. [SL]
posted by Mike Mongo at 9:20 AM on September 18, 2015
No, actually, item is right, she's wrong. Space is 100 miles above us. That's all it is to low-earth orbit (LEO). And solving for space–getting up there, living out there–is pretty much the only serious proposition that in pursuing will result in solutions to all the challenges we face here on earth today.
Ecology, sustainability, health, inclusion, and (of course) energy. Making space easily accessible and attainable solves for all those challenges. Running out of space? No problem. Running out of resources to the detriment of human life and much of the planet? No problem. just figure out the secret of easily going up 100 miles up and (quoting Robert Heinlein) "you are are halfway to anywhere in the solar system." And the solar system has everything.
In fact, staying here on earth is the only was to guarantee failing. And by failing I mean using and abusing our resources and environment until it is irreparably harmed.
Yet make no mistake: In solving for space, we promote solution-finding which enables the technology and science necessary for solving every challenge we face on earth today in ways that no other approach can. And as a full-time space STEM educator I share this with students inside and outside the US everyday. Where are the answers to our predicament? They are found 100 miles straight up. Our job is to get to them.
And speaking to your point, Sys Rq (ie the one made by Gil-Scott Heron's Whitey on the Moon), know that inclusion and equality are essential component's necessary to make space exploration work. The song and the point you make has to do with an absence of inclusion and equality in our day-to-day lives, and of the reality of scarcity and disparity, and of space adding to not reducing this condition. But that is no longer the case. (In some sense, it certainly was/has been.) Space in its modern form solves for that. We are insuring this. How do I know? Because I'm one of the people working on space today, people who care and are bringing these motives to space exploration, and we are making sure. [SL]
posted by Mike Mongo at 9:20 AM on September 18, 2015
What if the glory of manned spaceflight lets me sleep at night?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:15 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:15 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
How about we take some of the still images and put them in animation?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:56 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:56 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Yes, let's — it'll be amazing.
(I just had to go look it up — that flyover took place some 2-4 billion miles away from Earth. That's billion with a 'B'. Freakin' amazing.)
posted by benito.strauss at 5:45 PM on September 19, 2015
(I just had to go look it up — that flyover took place some 2-4 billion miles away from Earth. That's billion with a 'B'. Freakin' amazing.)
posted by benito.strauss at 5:45 PM on September 19, 2015
> How about we take some of the still images and put them in animation?
Whoa whoa whoa did you guys catch those craters on the far right during that flyover? Where are those images? How come I haven't seen those in full res yet?
We can date the surface of Pluto from those craters, and even without expert knowledge of the geology, it seems obvious to me that the near-side surface has been extensively re-worked, almost like it was flooded and iced over. It's a young surface! In the Kuiper belt! How the heck is that even possible???
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:49 PM on September 21, 2015
Whoa whoa whoa did you guys catch those craters on the far right during that flyover? Where are those images? How come I haven't seen those in full res yet?
We can date the surface of Pluto from those craters, and even without expert knowledge of the geology, it seems obvious to me that the near-side surface has been extensively re-worked, almost like it was flooded and iced over. It's a young surface! In the Kuiper belt! How the heck is that even possible???
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:49 PM on September 21, 2015
How come I haven't seen those in full res yet?
I'm not the scientists can say "Give us the high res version of this X,Y point". But that's a good question. Maybe NH is sending photos chronologically ?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:25 PM on September 21, 2015
I'm not the scientists can say "Give us the high res version of this X,Y point". But that's a good question. Maybe NH is sending photos chronologically ?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:25 PM on September 21, 2015
This Is What It Would Be Like to Sit on the Surface of Pluto
posted by homunculus at 6:49 PM on September 23, 2015
posted by homunculus at 6:49 PM on September 23, 2015
Online scale model of the solar system. (There is a lot of empty space.)
If the moon were only one pixel
posted by bukvich at 6:58 AM on September 24, 2015
If the moon were only one pixel
posted by bukvich at 6:58 AM on September 24, 2015
Say hello to your new desktop wallpaper.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:18 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:18 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
I am still blown away that there are almost no craters. When I was in school taking an Astronomy class one of the students asked the prof about plate tectonics on the moon. He was known for the next four years as "the plate tectonics on the moon guy" and nobody thought it was a compliment.
If you have a high rez monitor and internet bandwith here is a new Andromeda galaxy to play with.
Cassiopeia @ 1224 X 1224 is a little more manageable.
posted by bukvich at 8:47 AM on September 26, 2015
If you have a high rez monitor and internet bandwith here is a new Andromeda galaxy to play with.
Cassiopeia @ 1224 X 1224 is a little more manageable.
posted by bukvich at 8:47 AM on September 26, 2015
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posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:59 AM on September 12, 2015