Cassini image database & updates, And notifications of PDS data releases Options

[volcanopele]

Still waiting for all the RADAR swaths to return.

[elakdawalla]

Björn sent me these last week and I finally posted them: the Excel updates for the latest four volumes for his Access database to all Cassini images. Download from here.
--Emily

[elakdawalla]

After living with the browse pages I'd made for the Cassini PDS images, I decided I didn't like them, so I am trying out a new design, more like the one I did for the RAC pages. Please check out my new index to all reasonably good Cassini images of Enceladus and let me know what you think; after a little input I'll go ahead and do these for the rest of the moons. (An example of my old design is here.)

To whet your appetite, here's some plumes from rev 50.


--Emily

[Stu]

That looks brilliant Emily, a really useful resource I think. I know for a fact I haven't got the imaging skills or tech savvy to make any real practical use of it, but others here - and elsewhere - will, and they'll appreciate all your hard work and effort I'm sure. It is a lot neater and more easily navigable than v1.0. Great seeing all the plumes images in one place, really brings home just how fascinating and important a moon Enceladus is.

[jasedm]

Agreed - and nine days until the next sub-50km flyby, featuring amongst other things, some close-ups of the plume vents

[elakdawalla]

I know for a fact I haven't got the imaging skills or tech savvy to make any real practical use of it...

Hmm. It's kind of distressing to hear you say that -- this is intended to serve the same function as the raw images pages for Cassini, or the Phoenix mission, or whatever, except that it is supposed to provide access to much higher-quality, non-JPEGgy, non-contrast-stretched data that's archived in a way that makes it tough for amateurs to access. I'm trying to solve that access problem and make these much better data available to the public. You can do all the same stuff with these images that you can do with the raw Cassini images, you just aren't hobbled by the limitations of the raw data site. Clearly I need to do something to make this more accessible to you -- what do I need to do?

--Emily

[Stu]

Sorry Emily, that came out wrong! I meant use it in the same way that our experts here - ugordan, james, etc - will use it, i.e. making elaborate mosaics and finely colour- and level-balanced images. I don't have the software, experience (or patience!) to create the masterpieces they do. But I will definitely be using it to make simpler RGB composites and to pull details out of images of plumes and surface features, for use in my Outreach talks, and have already started on a couple of images today for use in my astro soc meeting on Monday night...

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I'm resurrecting this old thread to announce a new version of the database discussed earlier in the thread. All of the errors I mentioned there have been fixed and the database includes information for all of the ISS images released to the PDS so far (almost 200,000 images).

As earlier Emily has provided hosting for this big file (it's about 85 MB zipped). Further information is available here:
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/cassin...s_database.html

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I just noticed that the January 1, 2008 ISS PDS release is already there. What's more, there is now a compressed (GZ) file available for each volume. This is a very welcome addition - it reduces the amount of data to download and more importantly, download errors now manifest themselves as error messages during decompression. This is very important as I have discovered a few cases where files got corrupt during downloading without any error messages appearing during the download. Because of this I may even gradually redownload everything I have previously downloaded, this time as GZ files.

I haven't downloaded anything yet but now I know this weekend is going to be a 'download weekend' .

[elakdawalla]

*Glub glub glub*

That's the sound of Emily drowning in data. I haven't even wrapped my mind around the last PDS release yet! Not that I'm complaining.

--Emily

[tedstryk]

What's more, there is now a compressed (GZ) file available for each volume.

THANK GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!

[imipak]

Modern webservers do on-the-fly gzip compression, though the speedup may not be apparent.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This turned out to be a more interesting release than I had expected. Because of all of the recent Enceladus flybys in the extended mission I had managed to completely forget that this release includes the first targeted Enceladus flyby in 2008 (it occurred on March 12). The best images are in directory 1584035653_1584189857 on the coiss_2042 volume.

There are also interesting low phase images of Rhea from ~550,000 km where the phase angle drops down to 0.05 degrees. They are in directory 1579255943_1579280127 on the coiss_2041 volume. These are the best low phase Rhea observations so far and nicely reveal the opposition surge:



My measurements may be a bit crude but the result is obvious. At this scale the brightness at exactly zero phase is probably ~1.1.

[peter59]

I would like to note that in the directory http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassi...assini_orbiter/ you can find new files (updated January 16) with name xxxxx_MD5.txt. Cryptographic hash function MD5 is commonly used to check the integrity of files, now each Cassini's file is in MD5 expressed as a 32 digit hexadecimal number.

example:
b41fdfd79ca9eb873f86f9e910a66be7 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454738788_1.LBL
70d3903a26f05673022d98de4cf53dc3 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454725799_1.IMG
4b2321a08362f019afa50915faed31e8 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454738788_1.IMG
9b8e12e3469407daa881168233c5c95a coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454725799_1.LBL
07d2bf79db8a5939f3361c260c3b9794 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454745007_1.IMG
53e278ab66c32d87a11c7b7c37e14074 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454726579_1.IMG
792848149f521c6d57fdb65a27a7f5a3 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454745007_1.LBL
82171afd4c7bcbaa11c4e27be835d3bf coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454726579_1.LBL
9e785eda0deb16860f07c758aefc17fd coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454745055_1.IMG
368bc03dc3aef22914d308a44160ea65 coiss_2001/data/1454725799_1455008789/N1454727359_1.IMG

[elakdawalla]

...it's apparently been available since March 18 or so but I got the email from the PDS today. As before, there are now tarred and zipped archives available for all the images. Seems to be a lot of ring movies in there, spoke formation stuff -- are there any exciting moon encounters in this batch?

--Emily