
New Image of Pluto - ivank
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-image-of-pluto-houston-we-have-geology
======
pjtr
These 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/NHP...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-
Kits/NHPlutoFlybyPressKitJuly2015.pdf)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg)

~~~
fjarlq
Emily Lakdawalla has written an excellent guide explaining what can be
expected to be seen over the next several days:

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/0624055...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html)

~~~
pjtr
Indeed excellent, thanks! TLDR: Yes! "Pluto at 3.8 kilometers per pixel (~630
pixels across disk)."

~~~
magicalist
That's transmitted shortly after closest approach, but that won't be the
highest resolution image taken. It's just the highest resolution where pluto
still fits into the frame. The highest resolution images will just be of
portions of Pluto. One will come in on the 15th, but I believe the rest won't
be transmitted until September due to the slow uplink speed.

------
eroo
~10 years in flight.

~20 times the speed of a bullet.

~5 billion kilometers away.

And there are pictures from this. What a feat.

------
camillomiller
Wow... The picture of the science team reaction is gold.

~~~
nsomaru
To 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 :)

~~~
nabla9
This 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
I 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.

~~~
listic
> watching a sitcom as a bonding activity Never thought they can be used like
> that.

------
miralabs
Just 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.

------
bradgessler
Absolutely incredible. I can't wait to see the close-up pictures taken on July
14.

~~~
tedajax
Well 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.

------
aortega
I'm the only one that see an hexagonal pattern in the image? I don't mean a
single hexagon, but several.

~~~
Sammi
Hexagons are common in nature: [https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see-
hexagons-in-nat...](https://www.quora.com/Geometry/Why-do-we-see-hexagons-in-
nature-so-often)

~~~
js270409
[http://www.scanningvirus.com/](http://www.scanningvirus.com/)

------
sengork
Also NASA still use ThinkPads

~~~
eru
Google does, too.

------
nitrogen
The "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
Just 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?

~~~
natep
It 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=...](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)

------
mrfusion
Where does it go after the flyby?

~~~
kryptiskt
There 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.

------
sneak
It 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
> 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.

~~~
sneak
[http://xkcd.com/1551/](http://xkcd.com/1551/)

------
benihana
Off 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.

------
ATsch
couldn't help but giggle at

>After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.

------
peter303
I 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
Note 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/2015/0624055...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-
pluto.html?referrer=https://news.ycombinator.com/) (images to be posted on the
raw image page are in bold)

------
mudil
Why is image so grainy? In this day and age, we should have better images,
even from 5.4 million kilometers away.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
It'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
Even 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
There'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
LORRI, 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?ima...](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)
(actually closer to 75-80 pixels across)

