Voyager 1's Rhea, Reprocessing some old stuff Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Back in 1980 Voyager 1 flew by Rhea at a distance of 59,000 km. The flyby was over the high northern latitudes so these images still represent the best coverage available of Rhea's north polar region. This was a high-speed flyby and Voyager's camera was a vidicon camera so it was much less sensitive than CCD cameras. During this flyby special image motion compensation was used for the first time by the Voyagers by rotating the entire spacecraft. This technique was subsequently used extensively by Voyager 2 at Uranus and Neptune; without it the highest resolution satellite images would have been hopelessly smeared due to the long exposure times required. I wonder if this was the first time ever this technique was used - does anyone know?

Not all of the hi-res Rhea images were obtained using this technique but those that were are superior in quality compared to the other images; after some processing they are almost 'Cassini-like'. They are sharper and much less smeared than the other images.

The image below is a mosaic of 10 of these motion-compensated images obained at a range of ~75,000-85,000 km. I used the calibrated and geometrically corrected Voyager dataset. Because this was a high-speed flyby the viewing geometry changed rapidly so it is difficult and maybe impossible to mosaic these images using 'conventional' methods without ugly artifacts. I got around this by reprojecting everything to 10 simple cylindrical maps and mosaicking these maps. This resulted in a map that had some seams since the viewing geometry information I used wasn't 100% accurate (I had to reverse engineer most of the geometric parameters). I removed the seams and made some cosmetic enhancements in Photoshop. This means that there are very slight inaccuracies where the seams were located (e.g. very small craters may be missing or 'double'). The final step was to render the resulting map on a sphere. As previously indicated the viewing geometry varied rapidly; the geometry I used when rendering was fairly 'typical'. This is the result:



The resolution of this image is similar to the resolution of the original images (~0.8 km/pixel) although some very small scale details appear slightly more blurred due to all of the resampling steps implicit to the method I used to make this image. A mosaic of these images that was made soon after the Voayger 1 flyby is fairly well known but it is has some ugly seams and brightness discontinuities.

The smaller image below has a lat/lon grid to show the viewing geometry:



Close inspection reveals that the lat/lon grid appear 'outside' some parts of the limb. This is because in these places the imaging coverage doesn't extend far enough to the south.

[tasp]

Spacecraft motion was used serendipitously by an early Soviet era lunar lander to generate image pairs for 3D analysis of the surface features. The craft shifted (for reasons unknown, IIRC) between imaging sessions, and the resulting pictures had a sufficient baseline for the effect.