Dawn's first orbit, including RC3, March 6, 2015- June 15, 2015 Options

[pitcapuozzo]

New image of the bright spots on June 6th, from 4400 km!

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19568

[Habukaz]

Also in the release is, among other things, a nice mosaic of one of the two big craters in the southern hemisphere. These scratch marks north (?) of it have an interesting appearance:

[Jaro_in_Montreal]

New image of the bright spots on June 6th, from 4400 km!

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19568

With the image darkened a little, it looks as though some internal structure begins to appear in the white spots.....

[volcanopele]

Those look like compression artifacts to me. I think the "Spot 5" bright spots are still saturated in the released images.

[ngunn]

[Maybe the last few posts should be in a new thread?]

Does anyone know if there are plans to target the white spots with shorter exposures from this second mapping orbit?

[alk3997]

Those look like compression artifacts to me. I think the "Spot 5" bright spots are still saturated in the released images.

Lots of compression artifacts when zoomed in. Below is a 4x view of white spot 5 with very little processing from the original.



The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

I have to agree that almost none of the bright area is resolved even in this view. However, it almost looks to me that the main bright area is a mound covered by bright material. But that is certainly more imagination than analysis.

Andy

[pitcapuozzo]

I'm not a photographic expert, could they try taking photographs at a shorter exposure time in order to maybe resolve some internal structure/features inside the spots?

[Paolo]

shouldn't we start a new thread? the latest picture has been taken in the survey orbit

[Phil Stooke]

"I'm not a photographic expert, could they try taking photographs at a shorter exposure time in order to maybe resolve some internal structure/features inside the spots?"

I'm sure they have done so. The good images are just not released yet.

Phil

[fredk]

I don't know what the bit depth of the original raw images is, but likely more detail is visible in the bright spots in the original images compared to the press release 8bit/pix images. It's been a while since we've heard if the bright spots are still saturated.

The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

I think the dark streak is a slope directed away from the sun. It looks like it may be part of the boundary of a large collapsed (?) region (arrowed in my image below) inside the main crater.

If I'm seeing that correctly, it'd be a good guess that the depression has something to do with the bright spots...

[pitcapuozzo]

I'm sure they have done so. The good images are just not released yet.

Phil

Thanks, can't wait for those images.

[Gladstoner]

A comparison of crater floor terrain and albedo:

[Gladstoner]

Matching up features:

[dvandorn]

The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

Yeah -- the dark streak appears to be a shadow cast by a ridge of some type, as the sun is coming from the bottom of the image. In addition, the extreme blow-up, while rife with compression artifacts, does show that the uppermost of the small white spots is also casting a shadow in the proper direction. It's the only one of the white spots that shows a shadow above it, although that might be more because the reflections are saturating the pixels so much that the shadows from the larger spots are being wiped out.

I'm tempted to think that the fragmentation of the main, central-peak-like white spot along its edges is real, though the details are rather wiped out by the jpeg artifacts.

Two tongue-in-cheek things that occur to me, looking at the zoomed-in image:

1) The secondary white spots look like a long quonset-style building, with smaller outbuildings arranged around it...

2) The main spot looks like the saucer section of a Constitution-class starship, with the longer piece representing the engineering hull. Not much left of the nacelles, just a few small pieces, so they must have blown apart upon impact...



JUST KIDDING! But, hey, with the jpeg artifacts, you can almost convince yourself that you're seeing a regular structure in the high-albedo parts of the image, just as if they were artificial. And obviously, the scale is all wrong for these things to be anything but natural formations. Gonna be really, really interesting to see these features at higher resolution.

-the other Doug

[Jackbauer]

Show time : 3 more !