New Horizons Preparing for Jupiter Flyby

NASA’s New Horizons probe bound for Pluto is headed for a Jupiter flyby, its camera eyes wide open, in preparation for its swing out towards the fringe of the solar system.

New Horizons began taking black-and-white images of Jupiter and scanning the planet’s icy moon Callisto in the infrared this week as it prepares for a close encounter with the gas giant next month.

“They’re certainly all we could have hoped for,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said Thursday of the new Jupiter images. “We’re still 100 million kilometers out. We’re going to get 50 times closer, but they are very nice.”

The images are expected to be released next week. NASA officials also plan to hold a press briefing on the New Horizons mission on Jan. 18.


SOURCE:
Space.com

This is very interesting.

It was'nt to long ago that NASA released the very long range
pictures of Jupiter taken by New Horizons, which themselves
were very nice, so i'm interested to see the pictures from a
closer position to the planet.


Comments, Opinions?

It's amazing how fast this probe has gotten to Jupiter. It's only been about a year since this probe was launched. By Feb 28, it will swing past Jupiter and get a boost in its speed.

www.space.com...

It's a nice shot, but nothing overly impressive. Backyard 'scopes can do just as well. I would certainly like to see a Voyager 3 in the works.

[edit on 19/1/07 by SteveR]

Wow! Not only is it staggering how quickly it got to Jupiter, but even more so to consider that it will take 8 times as long to get to Pluto. Kinda adds a sense of scale to just how far out that little snowball is.