Given the fact that downlink of images pauses on July 20 and resumes mid-September, that means Friday, July 24 is going to be the one major raw image release day for the summer, and then there may not be much further until September 26.
The Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, as seen by astronaut Scott Kelly on the International Space Station, July 19, 2015.
The ISS has the safety blanket of Space Command/NORAD, which tracks relatively large pieces of debris – usually originating from expended satellite and rocket hardware.
Usually, this allows for the Station to receive a heads up and conduct a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM) to move the orbital outpost into a different path and thus avoid a potential collision.
Rare events are classed as Red Late Conjunctions, where the threat is spotted late – with no time to conduct a PDAM – and is inside a path that has a chance – albeit very small – of hitting the Station.
After a wait of more than 22 hours with no communication, New Horizons “phoned home” precisely on schedule after its flyby of Pluto. The signal was received at 00:52:37 UT | 20:52:37 ET | 17:52:37 PT. As planned, New Horizons returned no images with the Phone Home downlink. But every bit of telemetry indicated that the flyby executed successfully. The thrusters used as much fuel as expected; no “autonomy rules” were called, indicating that the spacecraft computer did not reset; and most importantly, the solid state data recorders are now crammed full of data.
Pluto sent a love note back to Earth via @NASANewHorizons. This is the last image taken before today’s #PlutoFlyby.
New Horizons images have dramatically reduced uncertainty in Pluto’s diameter. Stern reported Pluto’s radius to be 1185 +/- 10 kilometers, so its diameter is 2370 +/- 20 km.
[…]
New Horizons compositional measurements have confirmed that Pluto has a polar cap made of methane and nitrogen ices.
[…]
New Horizons has detected ionized nitrogen escaping from Pluto’s atmosphere five days before closest approach.
Every so often, an astronomical artist gets lucky. As the New Horizons spaceprobe closes on minor planet Pluto after its nine-year voyage, I’m astounded by how close I came to accurately depicting Pluto in 1979.
I’d like to claim prophetic powers, but the painting was guided by the reasonable assumption that Pluto likely has a periodically active atmosphere that distributes powdery exotic frosts into lowland areas. The reddish color of the higher features is caused by tholins – hydrocarbons common in the outer solar system. The partial circular arcs would be caused by flooding of craters by slushy exotic ices. Pluto is apparently more orange and Mars-like than I painted it, however; I assumed the exotic ices would push colors more into the whites and grays.
On July 11, 2015, New Horizons captured this image, which suggests some new features that are of keen interest to the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team now assembled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. For the first time on Pluto, this view reveals linear features that may be cliffs, as well as a circular feature that could be an impact crater. Just starting to rotate into view on the left side of the image is the bright heart-shaped feature that will be seen in more detail during New Horizons’ closest approach.
The New Horizons spacecraft is now approaching a milestone – only one million miles to Pluto – which will occur at 11:23 p.m. EDT tonight, Sunday, July 12. It’s approaching Pluto after a more than nine-year, three-billion mile journey. At 7:49 AM EDT on Tuesday, July 14 the unmanned spacecraft will zip past Pluto at 30,800 miles per hour (49,600 kilometers per hour), with a suite of seven science instruments busily gathering data. The mission will complete the initial reconnaissance of the solar system with the first-ever look at the icy dwarf planet.
“This is the first clear evidence of faulting and surface disruption on Charon,” says McKinnon, who is based at the Washington University in St. Louis. “New Horizons has transformed our view of this distant moon from a nearly featureless ball of ice to a world displaying all kinds of geologic activity.”
The most prominent crater, which lies near the south pole of Charon in an image taken July 11 and radioed to Earth today, is about 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) across. The brightness of the rays of material blasted out of the crater suggest it formed relatively recently in geologic terms, during a collision with a small body some time in the last billion million years.
U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James W. Christy noticed something unusual while making routine measurements of photographic plates of Pluto taken with the 1.55-m (61-inch) Kaj Strand Astrometric Reflector at the USNO Flagstaff Station in Arizona. The purpose of these images was to refine the orbit of the far-flung dwarf planet Pluto to help compute a better ephemeris for this distant object.
Christy had noticed that a number of the images of Pluto appeared elongated, but images of background stars on the same plate did not. Other plates showed the planet as a tiny, round dot. Christy examined a number of Pluto images from the USNO archives, and he noticed the elongations again. Furthermore, the elongations appeared to change position with respect to the stars over time. After eliminating the possibility that the elongations were produced by plate defects and background stars, the only plausible explanation was that they were caused by a previously unknown moon orbiting Pluto at a distance of about 19,600 km (12,100 miles) with a period of just over six days.
On 7 July 1978, the discovery was formally announced to the astronomical community and the world by the IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams via IAU Circular 3241. The discovery received the provisional designation “1978 P 1;” Christy proposed the name “Charon”, after the mythological ferryman who carried souls across the river Acheron, one of the five mythical rivers that surrounded Pluto’s underworld.
Over the course of the next several years, another USNO astronomer, the late Robert S. Harrington, calculated that Pluto and its newly-found moon would undergo a series of mutual eclipses and occultations, beginning in early 1985. On 17 February 1985 the first successful observation of one of these transits was made with the 0.9-m (36-inch) reflector at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, within 40 minutes of Harrington’s predicted time. The IAU Circular announcing these confirming observations was issued on 22 February 1985. With this confirmation, the new moon was officially named Charon.
(source)
the above image was taken not long before i was born, and for most of my childhood was the best image of pluto and charon i ever saw in textbooks, encyclopedias, and what not
so its really gratifying to have the below perspective now :)
kreuzaderny