Cassini image database & updates, And notifications of PDS data releases Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I have noticed that the January 1, 2007 Cassini PDS release is already available, see http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassi...assini_orbiter/

I haven't downloaded all of the imaging data and I'm just beginning to digest what I already have but there are some beautiful images of Enceladus' plumes and satellite mutual events, images of the G and D rings and interesting images of Saturn's nightside and fairly good Iapetus images.

Radar and VIMS is also available.

All in all a nice 'Christmas gift' .

[Bjorn Jonsson]

The April 1, 2007 PDS release is out with new ISS, VIMS and RADAR data.

I have looked at all of the ISS images and updated my summary of Cassini images at http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/css_stuff/im...s_overview.html.

I will soon be adding a list of flybys for each satellite near the top of the document ("a summary of the summary").

The ISS release wasn't particularly interesting to me this time. Some highlights:

* Images of Iapetus down to a range of ~600,000 km
* Two targeted flybys of Titan
* Many spectacular satellite mutual events since Cassini was very close to the ring plane
* Interesting images of Hyperion, Janus, Atlas and Pan
* Rhea global color at a range of ~480,000 km
* Many distant high phase images showing Enceladus' plumes
* Saturn star occultations

Incidentally, I ran into a few cases of erroneously formatted numbers in several of the index.tab files that caused some problems when loading these files into an Access database so I'm going 'complain' to the PDS. Example: 1.0524616e-
I suspect 'very small' numbers may get incorrectly formatted, possibly numbers smaller than 0.001 or 0.0001.

I could make the database available if someone can host it, it's too big for me to do so (about 55 MB zipped). It contains all of the information from all of the index.tab files on volumes COISS_1001 to COISS_1009 and COISS_2001-COISS_2023.