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Posted by baalke on June 1, 2007, 12:26 pm
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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/060107.htm
Full Set of Jupiter Close-Approach Data Reaches Home
New Horizons
June 1, 2007
Like countless others before it, the data packet rode a radio signal
more than 500 million miles from the New Horizons spacecraft to Earth,
filtering through NASA's largest antennas late last week to mission
and
science operations center computers in Maryland and Colorado.
But this particular data - infrared scans of Jupiter's day-night
boundary - were special for another reason: they were the last to be
sent to Earth from the New Horizons Jupiter flyby, which took place in
February and March.
"All of the data from our Jupiter close-approach encounter is on the
ground," says mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of NASA
Headquarters, Washington, D.C. "The data are better and richer than we
ever expected. The Jupiter system is spectacular and New Horizons
performed superbly to observe it. Our team couldn't be happier."
The dataset - about 36 gigabits, gathered from Feb. 24-March 7 and
stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders - includes the bulk of
New
Horizons' 700-plus observations of Jupiter's atmosphere, rings and
closest moons. Mission scientists have been poring through these
images
and spectral measurements since the spacecraft began transmitting
them,
and are reviewing the early results of this work at a New Horizons
science team meeting this week in Boulder, Colo.
"From the first close-up look at the Little Red Spot storm
<http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/
050107/050107_11.html>,
to the best views ever of Jupiter's rings
<http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/
050107/050107_10.html>,
to sequences of a volcanic eruption
<http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/051407.html> on
the
Jovian moon Io, we've seen some amazing things," says New Horizons
Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. "It's fair to say we met or
surpassed nearly all of our scientific objectives."
To get the science, though, the team had to meet its main objective:
keep the spacecraft safe as it flew through an "aim point," 1.4
million
miles from Jupiter, that set its course for an encounter with Pluto in
July 2015. The flight past Jupiter was also a chance to test the
spacecraft's systems and operators under real-world conditions. "From
the operations standpoint, it was a flawless encounter," says Alice
Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL. "The
performance
of the spacecraft and operations team really bodes well for what we'll
do at Pluto."
Since passing Jupiter on Feb. 28, New Horizons has sped nearly 100
million miles down the long, dynamic tail of Jupiter's magnetosphere,
measuring charged particles in this previously uncharted environment.
The observations will continue until late June. "The particle
spectrometer teams are very excited about what they're seeing so far,"
Stern says. "There is a lot more complexity and organization in the
magnetotail than they expected. But that's the way exploration works "
once we visit a place for the first time, our knowledge is changed by
the reality of what we find!"
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