Jupiter Ahoy! {New Horizons probe, launched in Jan, returns first pix of Jupiter}

[eppur_se_muova]

A press release, posted in full. From Earth to Jupiter in 13 months! This is the dragster that passed the Moon 9 hours after launch.

For Immediate Release
September 26, 2006

Jupiter Ahoy!

Blazing along its path to Pluto, NASA's New Horizons has come within hailing distance of Jupiter. The first picture of the giant planet from the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken Sept. 4, 2006, is a tantalizing promise of what's to come when New Horizons flies through the Jupiter system early next year.

New Horizons was still 291 million kilometers (nearly 181 million miles) away from Jupiter when LORRI took the photo. As New Horizons comes much closer, next January and February, LORRI will take more-detailed images.

"These first LORRI images of Jupiter are awe-inspiring," says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where LORRI was designed and built. "New Horizons is speeding toward this majestic planet at 45,000 miles per hour, right on target for a close encounter on February 28 of next year. LORRI's resolution at Jupiter will be 125 times better than now, and we're really looking forward to getting the most detailed views of the Jovian system since Cassini's flyby in late 2000 and Galileo's final images in 2003."

Now on the outskirts of the asteroid belt, LORRI snapped this image during a test sequence to help prepare for the Jupiter encounter observations. It was taken close to solar opposition, meaning that the Sun was almost directly behind the camera when it spied Jupiter. This makes Jupiter appear blindingly bright, about 40 times brighter than Pluto will be for LORRI's primary observations when New Horizons encounters the Pluto system in 2015. To avoid saturation, the camera's exposure time was kept to 6 milliseconds. This image was, in part, a test to see how well LORRI would operate with such a short exposure time.

"LORRI's first Jupiter image is all we could have expected," says LORRI Principal Investigator Andy Cheng, of APL. "We see belts, zones and large storms in Jupiter's atmosphere. We see the Jovian moons Io and Europa, as well as the shadows they cast on Jupiter. It is most gratifying to detect these moons against the glare from Jupiter."

LORRI wasn't the only New Horizons instrument peeking at Jupiter on Sept. 4; the Ralph imager also performed some important calibrations. "We rapidly scanned Ralph's Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera across Jupiter to test a technique we plan to employ near closest approach next February. We also observed Jupiter in the infrared using Ralph's Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array ," says Ralph Program Manager Cathy Olkin, of the Southwest Research Institute. "Everything worked great."

New Horizons won't observe Jupiter again until early January 2007, when periodic monitoring will begin, followed by intensive observations at the end of February. The spacecraft will also continue to look at the Jovian magnetosphere for several months after closest approach.

"New Horizons is headed to a spectacular science encounter with the Jupiter system early next year," says mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. "The first LORRI images of Jupiter just whet our appetite for the observations to come."

New Horizons, the first spacecraft to Pluto and the distant Kuiper Belt region, launched on Jan. 19, 2006. To follow New Horizons on its journey, and for the latest mission information, visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.


Media Contact:
Michael Buckley, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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[e-mail]

[TAPat]

1. Cool!

Dragster, indeed!

[Ian David]

2. No sign of the monoliths yet? But wait...

What's THIS strange image?

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. Personally, I think Clarke got it right in the first book

With the Monolith on Iapetus, not in orbit around Jupiter. In the book, Discovery was to make a "sling shot" around Jupiter on its way to Saturn. First that was cut from the movie, as the director thought it would confuse a scientifically illiterate public. Then he couldn't get Saturn's rings right in the special effects, and he decided to just make Jupiter the destination. By that time, though, the book was on it's way to the publisher and Clarke wasn't able to change it.

Clarke described Iapetus as a giant eye. Then, Cassini returned some disturbing pictures of Iapetus...

[TheMadMonk]

4. And that ridge.

It runs all the way around the equator. IIRC there's some speculation it's the remains of a ring system that orbited the moon for a while. Perhaps formed by the impact that caused that crater?

The Saturn system is full of strange moons. Some do the dosee do; another is black on one side and white on the other; They feed and shape the rings;

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. Iapetus is the black and white moon

It is tidally locked with Saturn (ie one side always faces Saturn, much like our Moon is tidally locked with the Earth.) The leading surface is covered with some dark, non-reflective material, presumably dust picked up from orbit (although why none of the other moons show a similar coating is unknown.) The trailing surface is bright, very reflective white, presumably some kind of ice. When you look at it over time with a strong telescope, the effect is that Iapetus "blinks" like a big eye as it orbits, an image that Clarke uses to good effect.

I haven't heard speculation about the ring. That would be interesting, as the ridge is not at the moon's current equator, nor at the moon's current ecliptic; if it were ring debris, Iapetus would have been knocked out of alignment after the debris had settled.