Animated dust devils from sol 285.
The interaction of the dust devil with the dunes and ripples in the first frame is interesting (see also "storyboard").

[attachment=49883:NLG_0285...devils__.gif]

I was going to post up the highlighted map but I'll wait until I can work out how to upload something in the post properly.

I have added my original map to the Shape File from SBMT which you can view here: Ryugu 3D Model

I'm keen to get access to other data to add to this:

• Colour Topography (Phil did you create this or did you get it from JAXA?)
• Thermal map in Cylindrical projection
• Gravity Map in Cylindrical projection

Yes, I expect for the 2061 perhelion we will have much better capabilities, even for a short flyby. A bit of a wait, of course!
(I do wonder what sort of wild trajectory would one need to actually rendezvous and follow Halley, Rosetta-style?

Nice to see an attempt to make a new map with a cylindrical projection, if that is useful for such an elongated comet nucleus. How are the coordinates defined? Perhaps with some additional effort it would look more presentable.

Almost all of the details in that "map" are artifacts. It's full of jagged transitions between bright and dark that don't correspond to anything whatsoever in the real world. Nobody's posted anything like that because nobody's interested in artifacts.

Here is a map:

https://solarviews.com/cap/comet/halmap.htm

a google search found the MS windows binaries
https://github.com/rpeyron/plugin-gimp-four...es/tag/v0.4.3-3

i do not think that there is a good way to remove that cris-cros hatching in that image

a forrier transform might , there is a gimp plugin for that

but just finding the " noise" to remove will be difficult

I assume you mean images from the LICIACube. Google is your friend--good to develop the skill to answer your own questions. Lots of information on this satellite including the two cameras Leia and Luke. The most detailed information I've come across in in this PDF

"LICIACube is equipped with two optical cameras (narrow and wide FoV) that allow acquiring significant images and evidence of the DART mission fulfillment. The primary instrument, named LEIA (Liciacube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), is a catadioptric camera composed of two reflective elements and three refractive elements with a FoV of ± 2.06° on the sensor diagonal. The optic is designed to work in focus between 25 km and infinity and the detector is a monochromatic CMOS sensor with 2048x2048 pixel. The latter is equipped with a Panchromatic filters centered at 650nm±250nm. The primary camera will acquire pictures from a high distance providing high level of details of the frame field.

The secondary instrument, named LUKE (Liciacube Unit Key Explorer), is the Gecko imager from SCS space, a camera with an RGB Bayer pattern filter, designed to work in focus between 400 m to infinity. The sensor unit is designed to contain the image sensor interfacing with a NanoCU, while the optics consists of a ruggedized, mission configurable aperture, lens and required spectral filters. Moreover, the hardware is capable of directly integrating the image data to the integrated mass storage."

I'll let you do the math to find the resolution.

I cannot found better topic than this one so I apologize for reanimation of this old topic.
Here is my collage of all cometary nuclei imaged by spacecrafts and planetary radars at 25 m/pix.
Now it's with C/2013 A1 Siding Spring.

I hadn't heard about Hera. It's an ESA mission to send a spacecraft to 65803 Didymos, the asteroid that Dart will crash into, and survey the damage. https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Hera

There's no thread for Hera on UMSF, but there are a few posts in the Unmanned Exploration Of Comets & Asteroids topic. http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ic=1951&hl=

NASA has an unrelated mission with the same name that doesn't involve robotic space exploration.

A NASA post from yesterday https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/h...er-solar-system, provides some beautiful images, a nice video and interesting commentary concerning HST's most recent OPAL survey of the outer planets. See also the Hubble site post here: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releas...1/news-2021-047

"how didn't pluto blow up into tons of pieces"

An impact crater forms as an expanding shock from the impact excavates a transient cavity, which becomes the crater after other modifications (gravity, ejecta fallback etc). For a body to be blown apart the entire body has to be within that transient cavity. No observed impact crater from Stickney on Phobos to SPA on the Moon or Sputnik on Pluto comes close to that. If you can see a crater it was nowhere near blowing the object apart.

Also, the drawings of Pluto are by James Tuttle Keane.

Phil

A closer look at the map projected images of that paper reveal around 4 fractures of the anti-encounter side "Reindeer Antlers" extending into the southern hemisphere as I thought would be the case as well as two features between them I can certainly say are craters, one with a central peak around 45 South 330 East. There are several other crater-like circular features and linear ones but these could just be noise artifacts as they do not stand out as much as those mentioned above. The best way I could compare this analysis is when Phil Stooke had to pick out features on blurry images of Puck, Larissa, and Proteus.

There is an afterword in that paper that had me checking the Brown & Batygin blog here. There are a few 2021 updates that I hadn't seen.

The paper that Phil linked to discusses that. High pass filters accomplish what I suggested with downsampling.

If the relatively brief description doesn't make this clear, it was obviously a lot of hard work, not just trying one or two things.

The removal of instrument noise can often be served to some extent by removing the noise seen in dark frames, or, if you lack those, the dark areas of other frames. It is essential to find ones with the same capture parameters.

I think you're greatly underestimating the amount of difficult, persistent, autonomous effort that is required. This isn't going to be something where you skim the manual, try one thing, quote a link without reading what was in the link, and expect to be done. If you're asking other people how to do image processing, and expect to get a result that they haven't already gotten, you won't get anywhere. We all have image processing software. The careful, painstaking, laborious, autonomous effort is the thing in short supply, not access to image processing software.

On another note, circular dark spots in those areas need not be craters. Instrument artifacts are often circular, Pluto is known to have circular landforms that do not resemble impact craters, and as I noted earlier, the atmosphere itself introduces multiple sources of noise.

Definitely getting some features here Fred. Good work!

Edit: Looking at the positions within the system, I actually think this may be mostly scattered light rather than Charon-shine.

I tried enhancing the contrast a little more here as well.

[attachment=38367:Fred_76_...__night4.png]

Regarding the Uranian satellites illuminated by light reflected off the planet: you can only see it if you are looking at the part of the satellite which faces Uranus - if you are seeing the region facing away from the planet you won't see anything. In the absolutely ideal case you would see 50% of the moon lit by the sun and another 25% lit by the planet, but viewing directions will not always cooperate. You might like to see this blog post by Ted Stryk:

https://www.planetary.org/articles/1362


And this is the LPSC abstract that started it all:

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2001/pdf/1074.pdf

Believe it or not, nobody had noticed this before. I can't believe it was over 20 years ago.

Phil

The Pluto image has detail for hundreds of pixels beyond the terminator, but at the level of exposure, that area of the image is speckled. It can look cleaner to downsample it, then turn up the brightness.

The problem with the areas of Pluto illuminated by twilight is that it's not completely straightforward what the detail means. With an airless body and a known point-like source of illumination, one can infer quite a bit. With illumination from an overhead sky whose luminance is itself not well characterized, it's in principle ambiguous whether, say, a dark patch in the image corresponds to darker albedo on the solid surface, slope due to topography, haze between the source of illumination and the surface, or haze between us and the surface. That's a lot of ambiguity.