NASA JHU-APL | New Horizons | 27 July 2010
In early 2007 New Horizons flew through the Jupiter system, getting a speed-boost from the giant planet's gravity while snapping stunning, close-up images of Jupiter and its largest moons.
Fast forward to 2010 and New Horizons has given us another glimpse of old friend Jupiter, this time from a vantage point more than 16 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, and almost 1000 times as far away as when New Horizons reconnoitered Jupiter. While the planet is too far for the camera to pick up the swirling clouds and brewing, Earth-sized storms it saw just three years ago, "the picture is a dramatic reminder of just how far New Horizons, moving about a million miles a day, has traveled," says mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute.
The photo, one of three taken on June 24, also marked a successful test. Project Scientist Hal Weaver says the pictures were part of an Annual Checkout activity to have the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) "see" objects relatively close to the Sun (from LORRI's point of view). The angle between Jupiter, New Horizons and the Sun - known as the solar elongation angle - was only 17 degrees, and to the camera eye the nearby Sun was about 460 million times brighter than Jupiter.
We wanted to see how much stray sunlight would creep into these Jupiter pictures, especially since we'll make observations of the Pluto system in a similar geometry after the spacecraft passes Pluto in 2015," says Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "We generally prefer to look at targets in the opposite direction from the Sun. In fact, LORRI is calibrated for the low light we'll see in the Pluto system and Kuiper belt. Pointing too close to the Sun could damage the camera, but we decided it was safe to try to observe Jupiter. The observations were successfully executed and the images look great. LORRI was even able to resolve Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, and Europa, another of the Galilean satellites."
Although the Sun vastly outshines it, Jupiter was still a bright target for LORRI and the deep-space photo session required fast shutter speeds, with exposure times of only 0.009 sec. That's why the much smaller satellites appear so faint in the LORRI images.
Concluded mission PI Stern, "This haunting image of Jupiter - far in the distance back in the Sun's warmer clines from when New Horizons came - reminds us of Voyager's family postcard of the planets taken from beyond Neptune's orbit about 20 years ago. Perhaps after we flyby Pluto in 2015, we'll try something similar from our perch aboard New Horizons."
Annual Checkout Winds Down
Speaking of ACO-4: the mission's fourth annual checkout, which started on May 25, wraps up this week. "We packed a lot of activity into nine weeks," says Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL. "It was very successful."
Read about ACO-4. The final activities included making sure the spacecraft's command and data handling system was in working order, and loading new navigation data into the spacecraft's guidance and control system, based on the June 30 trajectory-correction maneuver that refined New Horizons' path to Pluto. The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter has also been turned on, now that the other six instruments in New Horizons science payload have been shut down. Working from commands transmitted last week to its computers, New Horizons will enter hibernation on Friday (July 30) and remain in electronic slumber until November. Operators at APL will monitor the craft through a weekly status beacon and a monthly transmission of housekeeping data.
Credit: NASA/JHU-APL/SRI
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