A 5th moon discovered... Wow. Looks like the New Horizons team has to go back to the drawing board and revise the Pluto encounter sequence (obviously)
Bonus good luck. With Pluto that far out, the Jupiter flyby could have flung it out out of ecliptic plane by the required angle easily, although that would probably have required a closer flyby (potentially nearing Jupiter's radiation belts).
Looks like the good timing for NH saved a few years in cruise and a more risky Jupiter slingshot.
That's right, the Voyager probes did out-of-plane slingshots to encounter Titan and Triton.
Could NH be capable of astrometry - the long baseline would allow best ever parallax measurement of distance to nearby stars if camera capable of this kind of precision wouldn't it?
Quote from: Solman on 09/07/2012 07:34 pm Could NH be capable of astrometry - the long baseline would allow best ever parallax measurement of distance to nearby stars if camera capable of this kind of precision wouldn't it?You should be able to figure this out yourself, given the aperture of the NH telescope and the baseline and some basic geometry, etc.
To clarify - what I mean is that the orientation of the spacecraft and thereby the telescope, has to be known to extreme accuracy to measure the parallax angle change to the required precision relative to a telescope on Earth doesn't it?
For reference, LORRI has better-than-Hubble resolution for the Pluto system at two weeks out. So, it's not really useful for astronomy. Ralph is a scanline imager (each column on the CCD is a different filter, meant for sweeping), so not capable of imaging astronomical targets.They are extremely propellant-limited, and so will only spin down to three-axis stabilized a month-or-so out from the flyby.There are lots of astronomers on the New Horizons team (my boss included), and believe me, if there were some way to get science out of the cruise phase without affecting the primary mission, they would have done it.
Consider the data volume as well. Data rates that far out are low and they would need to compete for DSN time with many other missions.