March 15, 2010 PDS release Options

[Phil Stooke]

I bet you say that to all the cartographers!

Phil

[Rick Sternbach]

Rick,
glad the JP2s are working for you (they are all unsigned INT16). But the IMGs are there as well, just in case!

I just kicked out a couple of Terragen pix of Copernicus; the LDEM64 in JP2000 seems to have some striping, but I've seen that in MOLA files as well and I suspect that will get cleared up in time. I'll try running the .img through MacDEM and see what happens. Exciting times; I'm already looking into an 8" to 12" physical sphere with full relief, as well as some selected regions for rapid prototyping. - Rick

[zeBeamer]

Nice rendering
Yes, orbit improvement is ongoing... Hopefully next release some of those orbital track artifacts will be gone!

[Phil Stooke]

The Lunokhod 2 tracks are also clearly visible pretty much all the way from the hills south of the landing area to the end of the route, but the landing area in the image I looked at is not very obvious.

I have looked at the area I have been promoting for Lunokhod 1. It seems I was wrong! But the true location has not appeared yet.

Phil

[Rick Sternbach]

Nice rendering
Yes, orbit improvement is ongoing... Hopefully next release some of those orbital track artifacts will be gone!

Thanks. Not meaning to hog the thread, but here's a quick view of Orientale with a generic moon-ish texture. *Much* more experimentation in the coming weeks. - Rick

[nprev]

Emily wrote up a nice blog post with Phil's discovery, along with pics of Lunas 20, 23 & 24.

[elakdawalla]

I had the most frustrating day imaginable today, shuffling five ongoing projects and an insomniac baby, completing nothing; one of the projects is a lengthy blog post attempting to explain to all you folks who are not Phil how to dive headfirst into PDS volumes -- I really really will try to finish that one tomorrow. Anyway, after finally getting the kids to bed after the long, frustrating day I sat down at my computer and I was like, "For God's sake, why did they have to release those images at 5 pm Pacific after a day like today!?" I was darned if I was going to be the last space blogger to write about the Lunas and Lunokhod, which is what would have happened if I hadn't sat down to write tonight! Phil, I hope it was OK to fold in to the blog post what I know is a preliminary browse view from something I know you are working very hard on doing in much better quality.

[volcanopele]

Second, we are releasing ready-made textures for Celestia. Many of you know Celestia (shatters.net/celestia), and some of you produced normal maps from the Kaguya altimetry data. In addition to a LOLA normal map, a texture showing the topography in false-color was made.
location: http://imbrium.mit.edu/EXTRAS/CELESTIA/

Thanks very much for doing this!

Here is a comparison between the LOLA normal map and the Kaguya map:




Already an improvement

[Stu]

Not meaning to hog the thread, but here's a quick view of Orientale with a generic moon-ish texture.

Hog away, Rick, lovely stuff!

Very Chesley Bonestellian that Orientale view...

[Explorer1]

Is there a thread somewhere about the new photos of the old Soviet landers/rovers? I don't see one, and am vary of making a new thread on them....

[djellison]

You didn't look very hard. Just two threads below this one, in the very same sub forum, a thread that explicitly mentions those missions in it's subheading.
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6192

[Rick Sternbach]

Hog away, Rick, lovely stuff!

Very Chesley Bonestellian that Orientale view...

Okay, here's a shot of the highlands. I grabbed some part of a 45 degree north file and rendered away; I'll get better at describing exact features later on. I've looked through the LOLA files over at imbrium.mit.edu, and now see how they're organized, I think.

They offer the whole moon unwrapped as a cylindrical map at 4, 16, and 64 pixels per degree, in JPEG2000, .IMG, .GRD formats. Personally, I have no idea how to use the .GRD, so I'm sticking to the JPEG2000 and .IMG files.

They have:
45 degrees north and south at (I believe) 100 meters/pixel, 200m/px, 400m/px in the same formats.
60 degrees north and south at 120m/px, 240m/px
75 degrees north and south at 30m/px, 60m/px, 120m/px
80 degrees north and south at 20m/px, 40m/px, 80m/px
85 degrees north and south at 10m/px, 20m/px, 40m/px
87.5 degrees north and south at 5m/px, 10m/px, 20m/px

5 meters per pixel must be pretty darned detailed, and the file size gets huge, like 3.4GB for the .GRD file. The 45N file that I opened seems to have the craters looking correctly circular; I'll try opening a higher latitude file to see if they correct the geometry all the way up.

I'm going to assume that with more orbits and more laser points recorded, the density of detail will just keep going up, as will the file size.

I need a new computer.

[S_Walker]

Nuts...
finally got IMG2PNG to work, and had thought this would be the calibrated NAC data... unfortunately it doesn't appear to be :-(

[volcanopele]

Most data submitted to the PDS for most missions will be uncalibrated, raw data. The best way to ingest LROC data, get them calibrated, reproject them, etc., is to use ISIS3. http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/Applicat...issance_Orbiter lists the LROC specific programs in ISIS3, so it looks like the LROC folks use ISIS3 extensively like the HiRISE people do. If someone can post the links to the specific Luna mission images, I might be able to give them a try tomorrow, but I am not as familiar with ISIS3 as I am with ISIS2, which I use for Cassini ISS images (though I did use ISIS3 for MESSENGER).

[S_Walker]

Thanks Pele!