For the 20th anniversary of the Neptune encounter, I've uploaded the official JPL animation of the flyby to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdBOZWB3iAI
I have very fond memories of watching this clip over and over again as a rather eager 9-year old!
Ian.
Mmm I love this stuff.
I have written a very quick page that uses the solar system simulator to show what Voyager 2 was seeing exactly 20 years ago:
http://www.dmuller.net/realtime/imagesv2nep.php
and don't forget, the 30th anniversary of the Pioneer 11 flyby at Saturn is coming up soon as well:
http://www.dmuller.net/realtime/p11saturn.php?mission=pioneer11h
Cool, but I am surprised you left out the Titan encounter.
check out my blogs on
http://beyondthecradle.wordpress.com/ about the Voyager anniversary at Neptune.
also I am preparing an updated Triton flyover movie and some stills from it for release on Tuesday
to help celebrate the milestone. some of these can also be seen at http:/stereomoons.blogspot.com
i will also be posting some new Miranda views as well as a hot tidbit from Enceladus this week . . .
cheers
paul
As promised, here are stills from the new Triton movie. It is a difficult subject to work with, given that topography rarely exceeds half a kilometer. Triton isnt given to the method school of acting I guess. Hence you will not see towering volcanoes and such. Note that it is iPod format!
To see the movie, go to my stereomoons.blogspot.com site. It currently exceeds the 1mb upload limit, although i will see if I can shrink it. NASA Photojournal is also scheduled to post it later today at full resolution.
Paul
Most impressive ! Is the altimetry data going to be released in some map format ? I'm thinking that it might be possible to get it into Orbiter Space Flight Simulator for example or at least into Celestia.
Another problem with Triton is that it's topography is much more subdued than Ariel or Miranda.
For a simple free simulation such as Orbiter, there's no need for great acuracy. There's already a plugin for generating terrain from real or fractal functions. It's great because you can simulate a landing using realistic spacecraft parameters, velocities, mass, atmospheric pressure (if there's an atmosphere present), etc.
Here's more info and screenshots: http://www.orbiterwiki.org/wiki/Orulex
Please remenber that's it's a acurate simulation based on real world phisics and not an arcade starwars like game, so the visuals are not stunning. Nevertheless it runs very well on an average PC and in realtime.
At this time, only SRTM global Earth terrain , Clementine global Moon terrain and MOLA global Mars terrain are avaliable from servers. But it's possible to generate terrain from any grayscale image (less accurate but easier to do). That was what I was thinking about, a simple grayscale jpg with altimeter values on simple cylindrical projection would be very nice :-) ! Of course, there's already color mapped altimetry here:http://www.isprs.org/congresses/beijing2008/proceedings/4_pdf/172.pdf but extracting them from the PDF would destroy any accuracy.
I have made some Voyager-Neptune at 20 related posts in my long-defunct blog.
http://planetimages.blogspot.com/
Impressive Voyager 2 images and, except for the 1990 Voyager 1 mosaic of the planets, a superb farewell of the Voyager mission to the solar system. Most interesting follow-on was the fact that a JPL-member (Brad Smith I believe) had to be part of the IAU council in the time-consuming job of giving names to the new features on Triton. Real official names, not the JPL names such as "the scooter", for a white cloud around Neptune's South pole ...
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