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New Image of Pluto
- sneak 11y agoIt is interesting to me that the one constant tradition in astronomy from antiquity to today is that we name features observed in the heavens of abstract shapes after things specific and unique to Earth. From the man in the moon, to constellations shaped like swords or crabs, and now Pluto's whale - we seem to impose ethnocentrism on everything, no matter how remote.
- maratd 11y ago> we seem to impose ethnocentrism on everything, no matter how remote Because A5236 is so much better. We either give random designations or non-random ones. Random ones are hard to remember. Non-random ones will obviously be named in a manner that makes it easier to remember, otherwise why go non-random? So if you're naming something with the goal of making it easy to remember, then yes, you're going to name it after something that it resembles, however slightly. Please put the political correctness back on the shelf.
- bradgessler 11y agoAbsolutely incredible. I can't wait to see the close-up pictures taken on July 14.
- tedajax 11y agoWell they won't quite make it here on July 14th. The spacecraft will be spending most of July 14th making as many observations as it possibly can then in the following days/weeks/months we'll get a slow trickle of data back. The current plan actually calls for not getting a full download of all the data until November 2016! However we should have some reasonably good quality (lossy) compressed images back within the first week or so.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anon3_ 11y agoI find myself in a continual cycle of disappoint with NASA overpromising and underdelivering. Months ago they were promising pictures of Pluto. I was expecting some high resolution, full color images I could pin up as a wallpaper. Instead, everybody got http://imgur.com/k5xmi0D http://imgur.com/k5xmi0D. Needless to say, I felt a little jipped. For an organization with billions of dollars of funding to show a colorless image like that shows a disconnect with laypeople. Maybe they need more funding. Maybe they're hiding waste, fraud and abuse. I don't know - but they can't even get decent bandwidth and hardware to even match your daughter's iPhone in outer space.
- camillomiller 11y agoIs that some sarcasm I can't get? New Horizon left this Planet on Jan. 2006, you have to consider that, too. We have advanced imaging tech from 9 years ago aboard.
- NhanH 11y agoImaging tech is not the issue, we have plenty of ability to capture HD image (not movie level... but definitely internet level). Bandwidth, however, is a severe limitation.
- idlewords 11y agoI believe the imaging tech is also constrained by the radiation environment.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoTypically the technology aboard any space craft is 5 years older or older when it's being sent because it needs to be hardened and tested against the harsh radiation of space. So we're talking imaging tech from at best 2001 on this thing. So yes bandwidth is an issue but so is the imaging technology. They couldn't put an HD camera on this thing.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
- camillomiller 11y agoWow... The picture of the science team reaction is gold.
- nsomaru 11y agoTo me it looks like they (especially the main guy operating the computer) is putting on an expression for the sake of the camera. Cool how two people can get completely opposite vibes from a picture :)
- raverbashing 11y agoOf course it's some show for the camera, which doesn't mean they are not exited about the information they're getting.
- nsomaru 11y agoNot saying they're not excited, just saying that picture is probably not a good indication of their excitement.
- nabla9 11y agoThis is interesting cultural phenomena. First there was laugh tracks in sitcoms. Then Japanese started to add those small reaction screens in the upper corners of the TV-competitions. Now it has taken over the world. Shows like MythBusters turned into collection to extended reaction shots to stuff that happens repeated over and over. You can see SpaceX having employees arranged to react and cheer and film crews filming the reactions half of the time. We are spoon-fed with cues on how to react and reaction pics and interviews of people telling how amazing it and hyping it up has taken over. Some people can find it draining, but I think there is good reasons why it's done. Competition for attention is fierce.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoI think this is basically the same thing as a much older practice -- would you enjoy major holidays as much if people weren't so festive about them? A sitcom with a laugh track may be less cinematically pure than the same sitcom with austere silence in the background, but watching a sitcom as a bonding activity works better with a laugh track. So all things considered, it makes perfect sense to me for SpaceX to basically declare that certain occasions are SpaceX holidays and people should show a little more joy than usual.
- mudil 11y agoWhy is image so grainy? In this day and age, we should have better images, even from 5.4 million kilometers away.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoIt's imaging hardware likely from 2001 or older. Remember this space craft has been in flight for almost 10 years, in development for several years before that and the imaging hardware needs to be well tested and hardened for space flight.
- tizzdogg 11y agoEven if it was today's hardware, we'd still be getting grainy images from this distance. It might be slightly better, but not the amazing hi-res images people on this thread seem to be expecting. Pluto is really small and far away. It's just a tiny spot even to Hubble. Well get the hi-res images once new horizons actually does its flyby and once the data is downloaded.
- DanBC 11y agoThere's one person in this thread who is disappointed. Everyone else seems to recognise this as the amazing thing it is. Perhaps we just need some kind of infographic? If the camera is a single pixel, how many pixels away is Pluto? What's the equivalent using (as one person suggested) a iPhone camera?
- magicalist 11y agoLORRI, the camera taking these photographs has a resolution of 4.9 µradians per pixel. From what I can put together, the iPhone 6 has a horizontal resolution of about 340 µradians per pixel. So a 70-pixel-across image of pluto from LORRI (about what we have here[1] taken about two days ago) would appear to be a single pixel on an iPhone 6. It's possible that single pixel wouldn't show up at all since it's pretty dim all the way out there, but Apple has been working hard on their low-light image capture :) And that's of course not accounting for radiation protection, a very carefully designed CCD and mounting so you can actually do science with the results, calibration after riding up on a rocket, sensitivity across 350nm to 850nm, etc. [1] http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/view_obs.php?image=data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029878/lor_0298787344_0x630_sci_1.jpg&utc_time=2015-07-09%3Cbr%3E22:37:05%20UTC&description=OpNav+Campaign+4%2C+LORRI+1X1&target=CHARON&range=5.4M%20km&exposure=100%20msec http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/view_obs.php?ima... (actually closer to 75-80 pixels across)
- ATsch 11y agocouldn't help but giggle at >After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.
- eroo 11y ago~10 years in flight. ~20 times the speed of a bullet. ~5 billion kilometers away. And there are pictures from this. What a feat.
- pjtr 11y agoThese are from 5.4 million km away. According to [1], in a few days (July 14) a Pluto system flyby is planned, at a distance of just 12.5 thousand km (and a speed of 13.78 km/s), and they can take images of Pluto's surface at 70m resolution. Pluto's circumference is 7232 km. So, do I understand this correctly that we can realistically expect to see much higher resolution images soon? Or is the bandwidth really that limiting? It seems that even at 1kbps it would be possible and worth it to transfer some slightly higher resolution images. A typical color JPEG image at 640x480 is at most around 200kB, so that would take 27 minutes to transfer. For example here[2] is Mars at 640x480 in 38.4 kB. Is that unrealistic? [1] http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NHPlutoFlybyPressKitJuly2015.pdf http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NHP... [2] http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg
- sriku 11y agoWonder whether they're using compressed sensing [1] to capture and transmit the images. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing edit: ans no (I think).
- douche 11y agoIf we are shortly going to have that kind of resolution of Pluto, I'm a little curious that we haven't mapped nearer objects down to almost Google maps level detail. I would think that with Cold-War spy satellite technology, even, orbiting the moon, we could have every inch mapped in short order. Maybe we did already, and it wasn't that interesting? I remember the Google Earth desktop client having a Moon mode at one time, but that may have been a tie-in when Curiosity landed on Mars.
- Maxious 11y ago> Maybe we did already, and it wasn't that interesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)#Mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)#Missio... > The lunar observations made included imaging at various wavelengths in the visible as well as in ultraviolet and infrared, laser ranging altimetry, gravimetry, and charged particle measurements. These observations were for the purposes of obtaining multi-spectral imaging of the entire lunar surface This mission's result is what you see in "Visible" mode on Google Moon https://www.google.com/moon/ https://www.google.com/moon/
- benihana 11y agoOff topic, but I wish the New Horizons website's title said NASA - New Image of Pluto. When I have more than two tabs open, I kept looking at the tab the Pluto photo was in and thinking it was a blank new tab.
- aortega 11y agoI'm the only one that see an hexagonal pattern in the image? I don't mean a single hexagon, but several.
- Tloewald 11y agoIf I squint, I kind of see two or three hexagonal shapes (or implied shapes), but right now it's little more than a Rorschach test. Let's wait until we get some better images.
- Keyframe 11y agoSimilar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon
- Sammi 11y agoHexagons are common in nature: https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see-hexagons-in-nature-so-often https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see-hexagons-in-nat...
- js270409 11y agohttp://www.scanningvirus.com/ http://www.scanningvirus.com/
- escherplex 11y agoOh use your imagination. Careful analysis of the 'Band of complex patterns' past the five craters on the left scares up a series of Japanese characters which would be transliterated fu ri (unfortunately) ji ra i (land mines). Later higher res imagery should clarify this.
- aortega 11y agoNever mind, now with a better resolution image I can see they are clearly craters.
- miralabs 11y agoJust saw this awesome documentary from NASA about the New Horizons Mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJxwWpaGoJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJxwWpaGoJs - it is definitely a good watch.
- sengork 11y agoAlso NASA still use ThinkPads
- eru 11y agoGoogle does, too.
- m0llusk 11y agoThere was an interesting anticipatory essay regarding this posted on RibbonFarm: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/07/01/a-neptune-kid-waiting-to-always-already-know-pluto/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/07/01/a-neptune-kid-waiting-t...
- mrfusion 11y agoWhere does it go after the flyby?
- kryptiskt 11y agoThere are a couple of candidate Kuiper belt objects for a flyby in a year or two, they were found by Hubble after a search with ground telescopes came up with nothing. No decision has been taken about that flyby yet.
- peter303 11y agoI am a little frustrated at the "slow" pace of NASA puts the raw LORRI images on their public website. The newest is two days old. At this pace of approach every few hours closer has a new and more fantastic image. At least NASA puts up raw data fairly quickly. ESA takes months for its Mars and Rosetta images.
- magicalist 11y agoNote that the craft can't take pictures and send data at the same time, so it only sends back a few navigation images and only periodically, fewer now as they're doing more science as it gets closer. It also takes up to 4 or 5 hours to transmit the images (I think they're down to ~1 kbps now). The last few seem to have been posted within less than a day of the team receiving them. You can see the transmission schedule here: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html?referrer=https://news.ycombinator.com/ http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0624055... (images to be posted on the raw image page are in bold)
- nitrogen 11y agoThe "did you know your browser is out of date" popup ruins the site on Android. If NASA's web team is reading this comment, please test your site on mobile.
- jchomali 11y agoJust for curiosity, do anyone here knows how much time it takes to transfer images from Pluto to the Earth? And also what protocols do the NASA use for doing this?
- dharma1 11y agothe latency is 4.6 hours (speed of light), New Horizon's bandwidth is around 1kbit/s from Pluto
- natep 11y agoIt will take months to transfer the full data sets back. The data are formatted in ITF packets, inside CCSDS packets, inside CCSDS transfer frames. [0] http://public.ccsds.org/publications/BlueBooks.aspx http://public.ccsds.org/publications/BlueBooks.aspx [1] http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-fountain.pdf http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-fountain.pdf [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=oZfpYIUKDrUC&pg=PA347&lpg=PA347&dq=new+horizons+ccsds&source=bl&ots=xu5-AcaP3x&sig=Af-1FWiZN7Q2ync8eCy6UjElPKY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F5WhVaHiL8Kw-AGX6rrYBw&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=new%20horizons%20ccsds&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=oZfpYIUKDrUC&pg=PA347&lpg=...