Giotto’s brief encounter, Twenty years ago Options

[Rakhir]

Giotto’s brief encounter
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMSZ0NVGJE_index_0.html

Twenty years ago, in the night between 13 and 14 March 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley.

[ljk4-1]

Giotto’s brief encounter
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMSZ0NVGJE_index_0.html

Twenty years ago, in the night between 13 and 14 March 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley.

I read that Giotto would return to Earth's vicinity in 2016. Would it be possible
to capture the probe to examine what happened to it and get some samples
of Comet Halley embedded in the craft?

[djellison]

You mentioned the same idea with another spacecraft at some point - but it would be much MUCH easier just to mount a mission to go and collect samples from a comet (i.e. Stardust) than attempt to rendezvous with, encapsulate, and bring home an entire spacecraft. that was never designed to collect samples and is likely to show damage, but certainly not an aerogel like capture of samples.

For all we know, leaking hydrazine might have put Giotto into a massive spin. It might have broken apart, or it might be in a steady state of spin still.

It's a cute idea - bringing these things home - but ultimately pointless and certainly an enormous waste of a very limited budget.

Doug

[Phil Stooke]

This anniversary is a challenge to the UMSF image processing wizards. Giotto's images are available through the PDS. A great deal more could be done with them using today's techniques... but they are difficult to work with! I did a bit of this a decade ago but didn't take it far. The highest resolution images are tiny postage-stamp views of a small area... I think they could probably be combined to reduce noise and to create new mosaics.

Phil

[Decepticon]

**^ Waits patiently for someone to work there magic! **

[Big_Gazza]

Does anyone know if these images from one of the Soviet Vega probes actually show real details on the Halley nucleus, or is this just an example of creating non-existant details via overprocessing ?





Its been 2 decades since Giotto was sand-blasted and ESA released that famous "first-look" at a comet nucleus. I always wondered why other images weren't available, and then I find these on the link posted above.



Wonder if anyone has a link to any other cunningly-hidden Giotto treasure troves?

[t_oner]

Here is a moasic I made some years ago. I selected the best images but maybe some more can be done by doing what Phil suggests.

http://www.solarviews.com/raw/comet/halley1.gif

[Bob Shaw]

**^ Waits patiently for someone to work there magic! **

Hear! Hear!

(drums fingers)

(I can wait all night, you know!)

Bob Shaw

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Somebody -- I can't remember who -- told me at the Europa meeting that, even if the Giotto imaging team hadn't decided to indicate different brightnesses with different colors on the live photos, the unprocessed raw photos wouldn't have shown anything comprehensible to human eyes; it took considerable processing to reveal the nucleus on them. So, even if the images had been displayed in the usual way, Margaret Thatcher presumably wouldn't have seen anything on them and would have thrown her purported temper tantrum that led to Britain largely pulling out of the ESA. One really expects more from a chemist.

[Phil Stooke]

A few replies in one.

Bob, you'll have to wait a while!

Big_Gazza (if that is your real name), the Vega images you showed are heavily over-processed. The apparent fine detail on the nucleus is largely noise. Some of the more subtle and larger features might be real, but the smaller textures are false. Also, you can't trust that the edges of the outlines are the real shape of the limb.

and Tayfun Öner, whose work with maps is always very good - the images I'm interested are the last few images in the sequence, showing a small area near the "small end" of the nucleus. I have a hunch more can be done with them. Don't know when I'll get to it though.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

For people who have never seen raw Giotto images before, here are some examples.

Very small images! Not easy to work with. These are all available through the International Halley Watch dataset in PDS, and of course they are provided courtesy of ESA, the Giotto project and camera team leader H. U. Keller.

Phil

[ljk4-1]

They almost look like the Deep Impact images just as the impact
was happening, but with a much lighter background.

Thank you for sharing them.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

That first set of raw images sure as hell doesn't look "uninterpretable" -- which would seem to show that the ESA really did make a very serious PR mistake by not displaying them live in standard monochrome format. (Of course, they also had no way of knowing that Thatcher would throw a temper tantrum.)

[rasun]

Does anyone know, if the image data of the 6 spacecraft observing Halley (the "Halley Armada") have been combined together, creating 3D models of the nucleus and the atmosphere, for example?

Second, would it be worth digging up the original Vega images?

Is there anything new we can learn from reprocessing the original images, or there's no relevant development in image processing since '85?

[djellison]

An increase in image processing technology does not automatically mean new results from old data.

Doug