Yes indeed, like an old discordant video game, say an early version of Pong.

Progress though is always encouraging.

In this picture/sequence/time lapse video above we see the Pluto-Charon system that has a body to body distance of about 20000km from a distance of 50 mil km depicted as 1/3-1/4 the square picture's size say. It is now at ~25 mil km. It is approaching 1.25 mil km per day.

It will get as close as about 10000km from Pluto (about 4 times its diameter).

Basically it will be within less than 30000 km from the planet's center for only about 70 min. The real effective sub 15000km close up will last only 25 min. It will however have over a day to observe it from about 1 mil km distance or 50 times closer than above video.

The resolution eventually will be 1-10 mil times better or so at those magical 25 min. But i imagine they will collect a lot of data for much more time before and after that window.

The 2 orbits are approximate circles actually with about 8.7 to 1 ratio in their radii from the barycenter (the ratio of their masses too, their diameters are also 2 to 1). They do that every 6.4 days.

Also kind of interesting that the spaceship appears to be approaching the system near vertically to its plane of rotation, near parallel to its angular momentum vector, otherwise we wouldnt be seeing near circular orbits. Charon has very small orbit eccentricity so they are both near circular orbits when viewed vertically from the rotation plane.

The movement of both bodies show this to be a double (dwarf) planet system.

<2 weeks away, those dots are about to get a lot bigger! Super excited!

The New Horizons site should provide more new actual pictures and not just promo ****. We want to follow history as it's evolving.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/index.php

Patience until the close flyby? No.

Did you notice a mini crisis that developed 2-3 days ago and seems to be ok now but was almost a breath taking moment?

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/...?page=20150705

"NASA's New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto.

The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter "safe mode" on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," said Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science. "Now - with Pluto in our sights - we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

Preparations are ongoing to resume the originally planned science operations on July 7 and to conduct the entire close flyby sequence as planned. The mission science team and principal investigator have concluded that the science observations lost during the anomaly recovery do not affect any primary objectives of the mission, with a minimal effect on lesser objectives. "In terms of science, it won't change an A-plus even into an A," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder.

Adding to the challenge of recovery is the spacecraft's extreme distance from Earth. New Horizons is almost 3 billion miles away, where radio signals, even traveling at light speed, need 4.5 hours to reach home. Two-way communication between the spacecraft and its operators requires a nine-hour round trip.

Status updates will be issued as new information is available."

Never mind. Would be nice to wait another decade if they'd blow this.

Pics from a few days ago:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/S...705_annot.jpeg

Saw that the science channel is doing a show on Pluto the day after the fly-by. Made me think how bad NASA TV is. Could be a great channel but just sucks. Can't figure out who they are trying to appeal to. No one should have CSPAN as their model.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians and heaps of other mindless entertainment and media gibberish and whipping up sensationalism amongst the throbbing masses are more important than a fly-by of a remote dwarf planet. That is how humans are. Personally for me, Beer is much more important than Pluto. And that is how it should be. Preferences and all that rubbish.

Still, I'm giddy about what new things will be discovered. But then, I'm a weirdo.

A big poker whale on Pluto?



http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/S...2&image_id=211

this is getting fun

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

After 3461 days now only 1 day left.

Pluto


Charon






Trajectory

Eyes on Pluto App

"Using Eyes on the Solar System and simulated data from the New Horizons flight team you can ride onboard the spacecraft using “Eyes on Pluto” on your Mac or PC."

Obviously more to come soon.

Now that is cool. Really.

What's all that white stuff?

Some ice.

This is truly amazing.

It's almost inconceivable to me how humans were able to build a spacecraft that was able to travel over 3 BILLION miles in 9 years, stay intact, take readings and pictures of Pluto, and send them back to Earth quickly. Unbelievable.

I felt a little emotional when I was able to see Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus all at the same time a couple weeks ago, just thinking about where they are and where we are and all that. That we are actually seeing Pluto, that a piece of the human race has made it out there to send us those pictures, is just mind blowing to me.

Barely scratched the surface in our history of space exploration, today another cool step finding our way in the universe.

damn straight.

Earth#1

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/...?page=20150713

Size matters! So Pluto apparently is the biggest plutoid after all (or could be)

It's also incredible that all the way from Earth, scientists' calculations of Pluto's diameter were only 2 km off. wtf

false color image