MaverickSawyer
Acolyte of the Probe
No. There's still a working camera on the Voyagers, that they've used a few times since the end of the Grand Tour, if memory serves.
Is this the farthest we've sent (and used) a working camera?
Pluto has blue hazes and surface water ice.
Laurel Kornfeld
October 9th, 2015
http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/missions/solar-system/pluto-has-blue-hazes-and-surface-water-ice/
The ice on the surface is interesting IF there is internal heat, then possibly you could have subsurface liquid water. The blue haze in the atmosphere is interesting because it suggests complex organics in the atmosphere. The complex organics in the atmosphere quite likely could be communicated to the subsurface. Then you could have subsurface complex organics and lmiquid water, IF Pluto has internal heating.
November 20, 2015
A Day on Pluto, a Day on Charon
On approach in July 2015, the cameras on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured Pluto rotating over the course of a full “Pluto day.” The best available images of each side of Pluto taken during approach have been combined to create this view of a full rotation.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20151204NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first few of a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and this image sequence forms the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.
Every week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14. These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on the diverse surface of the distant planet. In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of spectacular, cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.
Pluto gets into the holiday spirit, decked out in red and green. This image was produced by the New Horizons composition team, using a pair of Ralph/LEISA instrument scans obtained at approximately 9:40 AM on July 14, from a mean range of 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers). The resolution is about 7 kilometers per LEISA pixel. Three infrared wavelength ranges (2.28-2.23, 1.25-1.30 and 1.64-1.73 microns) were placed into the three color channels (red, green and blue, respectively) to create this false color Christmas portrait.
December 31, 2015
Looking Back at the ‘Year of Pluto’
New Horizons Project Manager Glen Fountain gives a Pluto flyby assessment during a press conference on July 14, 2015. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will mark New Year’s some 125 million miles beyond Pluto, far removed from the excitement and activity that accompanied its historic flight through the Pluto system just five months ago.
The intrepid probe continues to send volumes of pictures and other data from the July 14 encounter – stashed on its digital recorders – over a radio link to Earth stretching billions of miles. And as the pictures reach home, they remind us that 2015 was the year a small world on the planetary frontier captured our hearts, thanks to a determined and inspired team of government, academic and commercial partners determined to expand the frontiers of science and explore an entirely new realm of the solar system.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20151204
EDIT: Just noticed "Every week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft ". Interesting turn of phrase, since most folk I know don't have a piano, but we all know how big they are...Grand, Baby-Grand, Upright, Honky-Tonk, Electric, Player-Piano, Pia-nola. maybe there isn't an SI standard of piano-osity?
N.
The time went by faster than expected.”
February 11, 2016
Putting Pluto’s Geology on the Map
Images from NASA’s New Horizons mission are showing that the surface of Pluto possesses an astonishing and unexpected geological diversity. To help make sense of this complexity and to piece together how Pluto’s surface has formed and evolved over time, mission scientists construct geological maps like the one shown in this image.
February 18, 2016
Pluto’s ‘Hulk-like’ Moon Charon: A Possible Ancient Ocean?
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Pluto’s largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin.
Images from NASA’s New Horizons mission suggest that Charon once had a subsurface ocean that has long since frozen and expanded, pushing out on the moon’s surface and causing it to stretch and fracture on a massive scale.
March 17, 2016
Research Papers in Science Reveal New Aspects of Pluto and Its Moons
The team behind NASA’s New Horizons mission – which last summer delivered the first close-up look at distant Pluto while capping the initial reconnaissance of our planetary system – earned several honors this month for its historic accomplishments.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft spied several features on Pluto that offer evidence of a time millions or billions of years ago when – thanks to much higher pressure in Pluto's atmosphere and warmer conditions on the surface – liquids might have flowed across and pooled on the surface of the distant world.
March 31, 2016
Pluto's Bladed Terrain in 3-D
'Blades' Across Pluto: This global view of Pluto combines a Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) color scan and an image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), both obtained on July 13, 2015 – the day before New Horizons' closest approach. The MVIC scan was taken from a range of 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers), at a resolution of 20 miles (32 kilometers) per pixel. The corresponding LORRI image was obtained from roughly the same range, but has a higher spatial resolution of 5 miles (8 kilometers) per pixel. The red outline marks the large area of mysterious, bladed terrain extending from the eastern section of the large feature informally named Tombaugh Regio.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
One of the strangest landforms spotted by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft when it flew past Pluto last July was the "bladed" terrain just east of Tombaugh Regio, the informal name given to Pluto's large heart-shaped surface feature