A tad chilly

        Google changed their logo to honor the flyby

They didn't know about the squall.

NSW is cover in snow as far up to the Queenland border !

I hadn't read of this particular feature of the mission before. An article in the New York Times says the 70-meter radio dish at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert of California is going to blast a known powerful signal toward Pluto, timed to arrive exactly as New Horizons is passing through Pluto's shadow and looking back at Pluto. The behavior of the radio waves as they diffract through the atmosphere at the edges  of Pluto will provide information on the structure and composition of the atmosphere.

Nice and cool there. :)

  It's Pluto time.

Here's that last image that was taken before the current planned 22-hour silent period. This was imaged about 4 p.m. yesterday and received here on Earth late in the evening. When the image was taken New Horizons was 16 hours from closest approach, and 476,000 miles from Pluto-- approximately twice the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Flippin 'eck, that's awesome!

Tidbit: the U.S. share of the Great Lakes' coastline is more than twice the length of the U.S. Atlantic coastline. Michigan's Great Lakes coastline by itself is almost 3300 miles, which is 50% longer than the Atlantic coast.

Now that's a blast from the past. I remember a teacher giving us that information in grade school, trying to explain why they're called The Great Lakes, and how massive they are relative to others.

New Horizons just phoned home a few minutes ago!  It survived the flyby transit, all hardware is healthy, all expected maneuvers were performed during data acquisition, and the expected amount of data was recorded. New Horizons is now headed out of the solar system.

50,000 year trip to the next star.

The first New Horizons flyby data, which will be of the highest resolution images, will begin to arrive at 2:32 a.m. this morning (EDT I believe), though I don't know how quickly it will be released. In addition to the interest factor, there's still always a chance for a problem, so they want to get the most detailed images right away since they're the most valuable.

Data is received at only 1000 to 4000 bits per second, equivalent to the speed of a typical modem in the mid-1990's. For the next two weeks New Horizons will continue to send the highest priority data, and then in August it will switch to a schedule of sending data back for 8 hours of each day. Total transmission time for all the data collected during the flyby will be 16 months.

The 3 Kuiper Belt objects that are potential targets for New Horizons (only one would be selected) are all about another billion miles off, or another 2 or 3 years away. New Horizons should have sufficient power to operate until somewhere around 2035.

   Congrats to the team that put that satellite mission together!

FYI, New Horizons' mission headquarters has a press conference scheduled for 3 p.m. EDT today to discuss some of the data that will begin arriving  this morning. I don't have a specific URL but it should be easy to find streaming coverage if you're interested. Alas, I won't be able to watch at that time but I'll get caught up later in the evening.

Even though the press conference isn't until mid-afternoon there may still be some images released prior to that.

The data expected from the flyby include:

• Pluto stereo footprints (3) at 0.24 miles/pixel
• Charon photo at 1.4 miles/pixel
• Hydra photo at 2.0 miles/pixel
• Nix photo at 1.8 miles/pixel
• Pluto occultation count rates
• Radio Science Experiment temperature measurements of Pluto’s night side
• Alice airglow spectra
• SWAP data on solar wind-atmospheric interaction
• PEPSSI data on pickup of molecules from Pluto’s atmosphere

Alice airglow spectra. I loved that band.

1st pic is Pluto, showing what is already being interpreted as one of the youngest surfaces seen in the solar system and possibly still geologically active. Sharp peaks rise 11,000 to 13,000 feet above average surface height, and "a paucity" of impact craters seen on most other bodies in the solar system.

2nd pic is Charon. The large chasm running across the center is about 600 miles long, and the deepest canyon portion is 4 to 6 miles deep.

3rd pic is the best photo we had of Pluto until a few weeks ago.

All three are cool looking.

A warm 3-month forecast for the entire Pacific Coast including wrapping around to the Arctic Coast. I don't think I've ever seen a 70% probability contour on a 3-month forecast.