Voyager 2 imaging of Triton Options

[angel1801]

I was just wondering if someone has "super enhanced" the Voyager 2 images of Neptune's largest moon Triton and made them available to the public? I've read about and seen it done on Voyager images of Saturn's moons. Considering there won't be an orbiter going to Neptune being launched for a long time, this could be very worth while idea.

[Doug M.]

Gorgeous. Makes you wonder if Pluto will have similar "cantelope" terrain? Some other sort of geologically active surface? Or just ancient craters on ice?

Whatever is there, we should (eventually, weeks and months after flyby) get good pictures of it -- NASA says that New Horizons will give us "images with resolution as high as 25 m/pixel, 4-color global dayside maps at 0.7 km/pixel, hyper-spectral near infrared maps at 7 km/pixel globally and 0.6 km/pixel for selected areas". The late Argo proposal for a mission to Neptune -- a flyby with a subsequent visit to a Kuiper Belt Object -- would have been basically New Horizon with a somewhat different instrument suite and 2010s technology. It would have flown as close as 200 km (!) to Triton, which would have allowed resolutions down in the tens-of-meters range.

Argo depended on a Jupiter-Saturn flyby, though -- a planetary alignment that will go away for a long time in 2020. So, probably not.


Doug M.

[john_s]

Couple comments:

1) I thought the crisp horizon shot of the canteloupe terrain was taken after that blurrier overlapping image, but maybe I'm mis-remembering. I guess I'm biased in favor of the horizon shot, because it's sharper, but also because I wrote the original press release caption for it, back in 1989 .

2) I'm not sure where the 25 m/pixel number came from for the best New Horizons resolution on Pluto- the best resolution will actually be about 90 meters/pixel (much better than that best Voyager Triton image).

John

[Stefan]

1) I thought the crisp horizon shot of the canteloupe terrain was taken after that blurrier overlapping image, but maybe I'm mis-remembering. I guess I'm biased in favor of the horizon shot, because it's sharper, but also because I wrote the original press release caption for it, back in 1989 .

That's fascinating, John, you must have been so excited at the time! Do you remember what you wrote?

[tedstryk]

John, is this the original caption? I'm assuming it is referring to true resolution, as the resolution in km/pixel is better than that.