The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
The science fun is starting on New Horizons' Jupiter flyby
Feb. 23, 2007 | 09:28 PST | 17:28 UTC
In just a few hours, New Horizons will crank up its science activities for the closest phase of its Jupiter flyby. Science activities start just after midnight UT (at 16:40 PST) with imaging of Jupiter's volcanically active moon Io, searching for plumes from active eruptions. The science fun will continue for the next ten days. My understanding is that there will be few, if any, images returned during this period, as New Horizons will be saving everything on board for later transmission. I'm sure the pictures will be worth the wait!
In the meantime, here's a cool animation that the New Horizons LORRI team put together. Making this animation required a total of 66 global snapshots of Jupiter, taken as six 11-image sets. Each set covered one complete Jupiter rotation, which means that each set consitituted a snapshot of the state of Jupiter's cloud systems. They reprojected and mosaicked the 11 images from each set into six global maps, then stacked and animated those global maps. The animation is a bit jerky, as the time steps separating the six maps were not constant, but it captures fascinating dynamics within Jupiter's cloud systems. The large version is well worth a look, but I'll warn you it's 5 Megs in size Jupiter's cloud motions as seen by New Horizons(Warning: enlarged version is 5 MB.) As New Horizons approached Jupiter, it captured six sets of images following the planet through one complete rotation each. Each set was merged into a single global map. The six maps, taken from January 8 to 22, 2007, are animated here to show the motion of Jupiter's clouds over a period of two weeks. The Great Red Spot, an anticyclone, visibly rotates counterclockwise, while an equatorial band of clouds exhibits dynamic behavior. Two dark spots that appear in only one frame are the shadows of Io and Ganymede. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI |
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