The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Jupiter is filling New Horizons' windshield
Feb. 13, 2007 | 21:05 PST | Feb. 14 05:05 UTC
This just in: the February 10 images of Jupiter from New Horizons have now been posted to the New Horizons Science Operations Center website. Jason Perry was quick on the draw and produced this lovely mosaic. Jupiter from New HorizonsNew Horizons snapped the four images that compose this mosaic of Jupiter on February 10, 2007, at a range of just under 30 million kilometers (18 million miles) from the planet. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / mosaic by Jason Perry |
The observation was designed to be the last one in which the LORRI camera could fit all of Jupiter into a single field of view, but it turns out that they took it as a four-frame (two-by-two) mosaic anyway. I guess maybe they did that because Jupiter is too bright for LORRI when it fills LORRI's field of view. According to the encounter timeline, that's the last science observation for almost two weeks, until February 22, then the science activities will begin to happen very quickly. My impression from how John Spencer speaks about the encounter is that they won't be getting a lot of science data back from the spacecraft during the early part of the encounter, so I'm prepared to have to wait (however impatiently) to see the next pictures of the Jupiter system from New Horizons.
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