When they do these false color images, is it supposed to show what we would see if we were there, or just what some scientist's kid colored in at the kitchen table? Or something else?

The image was first made by taking a picture with each of the the three color filters (red, blue, and green) found on the Ralph camera. Those images were then combined and the resulting colors were enhanced. This process lets the team get a more detailed view of surface features — the false colors help scientists understand the boundaries of different geological regions. Take the "heart" on Pluto, for example. In this morning's image it looks like one large homogenous region. In the exaggerated-color image, however, you can see a distinct split between the left and right sides. The false-color image suggests the two sides may be composed of different material.


http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/14/89...color-pictures

Spacecraft is safe & on its way to the deeper Kuiper Belt. Great day, wish we had more than we do in the future.

A bit over 1h ago the message from the spaceship confirming proper flyby was received;

"UPDATE: New Horizons Spacecraft Signal Received, Successful Pluto Flyby Confirmed"
I think the message started coming to us 9 hours after the closest distance. Now its about 14.5h later than that point (takes light ~4.2h to get here).

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

If you don't look for a heart you can see something else.

The area to the left is a head, and to the right is a muzzle. To the bottom is a neck. In short, it looks like a profile of a dog, Disney's Pluto dog.

Pluto on Pluto, film at 11.

The head of the dog (the white) with its nose (and closed mouth pronounced on the right and one eye (dark spot at the upper corner of the "heart" and the left a bit) also one long ear on the left and the neck hinting a body is lower that is not depicted because it is lost to the curvature. Basically the legs would be on the other side or imagine its just the upper body of the dog (bust ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_%28sculpture%29). Which dog?

But of course indeed precisely this kind;



The brain does indeed see what it wants lol sometimes.

Just saw a documentary that claimed New Horizons spaceship had part of the ashes of the astronomer that first discovered Pluto;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh

"A small portion of his ashes was placed aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. The container includes the inscription: "Interned [sic] herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'. Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906–1997)"

Imagine if they had also some DNA in it. No doubt a very advanced civilization that probably doesnt exist nearby, would be able to spot even in that spaceship elements of life that we missed in the preparation of the spaceship moreover the care and the hostile space conditions, that survived for a while. (or run advanced AI analysis to reverse engineer the kind of being that would have designed a spaceship that way with such parts and detectors/equipment or "where" it came from based on isotopic analysis and cosmic rays degradation over time lol)

Pluto on Pluto.

Day is complete.

This is awesome. I wish the papers and facebook were filled with people marvelling at this stuff rather than all the celebrity bs.

I dont get how people can't be in awe of these feats of human achievement .

I think people find it hard to imagine how far 3 billion miles is. Large numbers in general are hard to imagine as a human and that's part of the reason why people aren't as in awe as they should be about the technicality of a lot of space feats.

I personally think talking about and imagining the Voyager spacecrafts would be awesome convo for socializing but most people find it pretty meh unless you can be as concise and articulate as the Sagans, Rosalind Franklins and Feynmans of this world, but still, in my experience they prefer some esoteric english lit writer as the subject than a craft flying into interstellar space.

Just like despite what we now know of the Universe, people think of mother Earth churning out green forests full of trees and not Hydrogen gas, as being the far better example of nature. When in fact trees, it can be argued, are an aberration in nature. Then you get into the whole semantics of the word nature, but the fact is that the realm of trees is just an infinitesimally small niche within nature.

Originally Posted by plaaynde
Guys, what do you think Pluto will look like?

I win

Wife said it will look like an agate marble

Our further boundaries have more clarity than ever before! Good times.

NASA to release more pictures @3PM EST

It will take months for all the data acquired to stream back to earth. The photo images are fantastic but other forms of data/imaging that will be beamed back in the coming months will further enhance our knowledge.

Good point. I recall there are half a dozen other instruments than the visual.

Last night during the lead-up to the health check they said it will be over a year before they have all data from the fly-by.

What they're doing now is selectively sending a sample of some of what they expect to be the most interesting bits.

What's the "slice" at 2oclock ish on Charon?

5 mile deep canyon http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/S...2&image_id=230

Regarding the data transfer back to Earth.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

you can see that the X band is used for communications;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_band

"The X band is a segment of the microwave radio region of the electromagnetic spectrum. In some cases, such as in communication engineering, the frequency range of the X band is rather indefinitely set at approximately 7.0 to 11.2 gigahertz (GHz). In radar engineering, the frequency range is specified by the IEEE at 8.0 to 12.0 GHz (8.9 to 9.1 Bel Hz)."

"Space communications

Portions of the X band are assigned by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) exclusively for deep space telecommunications. The primary user of this allocation is the American NASA Deep Space Network (DSN)[citation needed]. DSN facilities are located in Goldstone, California (in the Mojave Desert), near Canberra, Australia, and near Madrid, Spain.

These three stations, located approximately 120 degrees apart in longitude, provide continual communications from the Earth to almost any point in the Solar System independent of Earth rotation. DSN stations are capable of using the older and lower S band deep-space radio communications allocations, and some higher frequencies on a more-or-less experimental basis, such as in the K band.

Notable deep space probe programs that have employed X band communications include the Viking Mars landers; the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond; the Galileo Jupiter orbiter; the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, the Curiosity rover and the Cassini-Huygens Saturn orbiter.

An important use of the X band communications came with the two Viking program landers. When the planet Mars was passing near or behind the Sun, as seen from the Earth, a Viking lander would transmit two simultaneous continuous-wave carriers, one in the S band and one in the X band in the direction of the Earth, where they were picked up by DSN ground stations. By making simultaneous measurements at the two different frequencies, the resulting data enabled theoretical physicists to verify the mathematical predictions of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. These results are some of the best confirmations of the General Theory of Relativity."

and specifically regarding New Horizons;

"Communication with the spacecraft is via X band. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter; at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s per transmitter is expected. Besides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a latency of about 4.5 hours (one-way). The 70 m (230 ft) NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes are used to relay commands once it is beyond Jupiter. The spacecraft uses dual redundant transmitters and receivers, and either right- or left-hand circular polarization. The downlink signal is amplified by dual redundant 12-watt traveling-wave tube amplifiers (TWTAs) mounted on the body under the dish. The receivers are new, low-power designs. The system can be controlled to power both TWTAs at the same time, and transmit a dual-polarized downlink signal to the DSN that nearly doubles the downlink rate. DSN tests early in the mission with this dual polarization combining technique were successful, and the capability is now considered operational (when the spacecraft power budget permits both TWTAs to be powered).

In addition to the high-gain antenna, there are two backup low-gain antennas and a medium-gain dish. The high-gain dish has a Cassegrain reflector layout, composite construction, and a 2.1-meter (7 ft) diameter providing over 42 dBi of gain, has a half-power beam width of about a degree. The prime-focus, medium-gain antenna, with a 0.3-meter (1 ft) aperture and 10° half-power beam width, is mounted to the back of the high-gain antenna's secondary reflector. The forward low-gain antenna is stacked atop the feed of the medium-gain antenna. The aft low-gain antenna is mounted within the launch adapter at the rear of the spacecraft. This antenna was used only for early mission phases near Earth, just after launch and for emergencies if the spacecraft had lost attitude control.

New Horizons will record scientific instrument data to its solid-state memory buffer at each encounter, then transmit the data to Earth. Data storage is done on two low-power solid-state recorders (one primary, one backup) holding up to 8 gigabytes each. Because of the extreme distance from Pluto and the Kuiper belt, only one buffer load at those encounters can be saved. This is because New Horizons will require approximately 16 months after it has left the vicinity of Pluto (or future target object) to transmit the buffer load back to Earth.[51]

Part of the reason for the delay between the gathering of and transmission of data is because all of the New Horizons instrumentation is body-mounted. In order for the cameras to record data, the entire probe must turn, and the one-degree-wide beam of the high-gain antenna will almost certainly not be pointing toward Earth. Previous spacecraft, such as the Voyager program probes, had a rotatable instrumentation platform (a "scan platform") that could take measurements from virtually any angle without losing radio contact with Earth. New Horizons* '​ elimination of excess mechanisms was implemented to save weight, shorten the schedule, and improve reliability during its 15-year lifetime.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft experienced platform jamming at Saturn; the demands of long time exposures at Uranus led to modifications of the mission such that the entire probe was rotated to make the time exposure photos at Uranus and Neptune, similar to how New Horizons will rotate."


I remember during the close encounter phase say lasting 1 day 1/2+1/2 (within 500000km of the targets and lowest around 12500km) the rate of picture taking among other measurements was one per minute or so and at some points even faster. So as a basic rough idea you can imagine if each picture was even 10 MB at the best closer segments of the encounter and say you have over 1500 images needing 15 Gb. It says above it has 2x8GB Solid State Recorders (so if they used today's technology it would be so much better, hinting the eternal/classic problem with long duration space missions and the rate of progress of technology). So you get the idea what kind of data they can accumulate (clearly they are not just taking pictures, they are doing much more serious measurements of all kinds of things but typically those are not as dense in data accumulation so i used the picture equivalent as a bound type argument). So to send back say 8 GByte data at 1 kbit/sec you would need like 740 days or something. Lets just say that if 20-30% of that data has priority you can expect over 5 months of time to collect it at that pace.

Obviously if you wanted to get a big first 10x10 MB ideally selected at times to be closer/more revealing images/measurements from the beginning of the transmission sequence (to satisfy instant curiosity) you would need ~10 days. So imagine a great pic type data every day if it were sending constantly at that rate.

Now obviously this is a crude estimate of things because they have much different specifications likely for each picture/measurement they take (than just taking 10 Mb pics per min like a naive photographer would), as each attempt/process has different purposes than the ones taken before and after, to collect a more representative/intelligent kind of scientific data set and avoid naive redundancies in the information they accumulate.

If one wishes to see what the DSN is doing in real time, JPL has a link

http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

As I type Canberra is talking to New Horizons and Voyager 2

I'm not sure what everyone else was expecting, but even with the little bit of data we received, it has been stunning. Beyond anything I was expecting.

Just stop for a moment and recognize that all our lives we have imagined Pluto a very distant, frozen, dark place, where the 248y of period told almost all the story. A place so far and therefore so slow that takes centuries to orbit and even for light, with its tremendous speed, hours to get to. A true underworld kind of place that "seasons" last a human lifetime!

And now it is in our present that we have seen the true nature of this world. Higher intelligence has witnessed this world likely for the first time in its history. The childhood imagination and awe for the pure size of distances involved in its orbit, that gave its place to indifference in adult life, reserving only some rare, obscure spot for our sci fi thoughts, has now become, several decades later, a place that is no longer unknown and dark and unexplored but rather prominently illuminated, part of our collective experience and awareness. It now stands up there as vivid (if not more) as the rest of the planets that were a lot better known to us in our early youth. We were born to their exploration or it was part of our youth growing up, so they were established in our imagination at a much stronger dependable level a lot earlier i mean as a given. We have lived with them being known. In contrast until now the given for Pluto was questions and darkness. No more.

Yes it is indeed remarkable when this kind of transition happens in your life because it touches and modifies a childhood knowledge, magnifying it thousands of times, connecting it with present reality. We shared that ignorance and limited knowledge about the true nature of Pluto with our parents and grandparents and now we all share the higher knowledge that comes with the recent experiences too.

It is a trivial thought but it touches your soul when you consider it for a few seconds. Very few things in our lives patiently awaited their revision for decades...We do indeed live in interesting times.