GAZE upon our HI-RES DWARF PICS of Pluto, beams proud NASA Pictures of the surface of Pluto snapped by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are increasing in quality, as it edges closer to its July sojourn through the Pluto system. New pics from the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken between 29 May and 2 June show that Pluto is a "complex world with very bright and …
That's Pluto. PLUTO! An unimaginably distant planet (yes, planet) that I will see images of in my lifetime (I hope); the same lifetime in which our species left earth for the first time. Only two generations after we first took to the air.
Am I the only one who is totally blown away by this staggering achievement?
> Am I the only one who is totally blown away by this staggering achievement?
Not at all. It is a wonderful achievement.
The lack of fanfare could be down to various factors (e.g. given how far both Voyagers had already gone a couple of decades ago, Mr. bloke-in-the-street could be forgiven for thinking we've already been there) but hopefully the coverage - and excitement - will mount as we approach the fly-by.
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Not dissing voyager.. I still have the projector slide set of Jupiter I got in my Youf. But the mechanics of the flyby's of the Voyagers was such that they'd *never* get near Pluto, so most of us assumed we'd never see whatever was out there in our lifetime, because no-one would be mad enough to send out a probe off into that direction. We'd missed our chance..
Even theze foggy images are already 1000% percent more than I , and with me a lot of amateur astronomers, ever expected to see.. And I can fill my slide tray with the final pics of the Nine.. :)
But the mechanics of the flyby's of the Voyagers was such that they'd *never* get near Pluto
That was quite possible, and indeed it had been pencilled in as one possible path to take: it is also the primary reason there were two Voyagers in the first place. The plan was that after Saturn the probes would diverge, one going to Uranus and Neptune, the other going on to Pluto - the orbital mechanics didn't allow a single probe to go on to all three but you could still choose between the two alternatives.
As it turned out Titan looked too interesting in the initial Voyager 2 findings, so Voyager 1 was diverted to try (and largely fail) to find out more. After that the option was gone.
If you know the camera's point-spread function accurately, which I assume the guys who built the probe did, you can deconvolve the received image with the point-spread function.
It makes more sense in the frequency domain (plus phase) where the deconvolution process consists of dividing the image spectrum by the camera's "low pass filter" effect to restore the original image. This, of course, is not as easy as it sounds for various reasons:
1) There is noise in the image (both random and quantisation due to A/D converters). This gets magnified seriously wherever the camera has poor spatial resolution.
2) If there are nulls in the camera's response you have irrecoverably lost that information.
3) You might be trying to compensate for two effects - the camera's response and the movement of the system.
4) Errors in the above can become artefacts.
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