MESSENGER News Thread, news, updates and discussion Options

[tedstryk]

I don't think those heaters worked, and there was a lot of fear that the cameras would fail outright. It really did have the best camera on a planetary spacecraft to date. On the first encounter, the tape-recorded images are indeed excellent and crisp, although not all the images were recorded. In constructing my mosaic, I used a lot of real time images for gapfill. The tape recorder failed after the first encounter, so all images were returned in real time. Due to DSN problems, only a quarter of each third encounter frame could be sent. Also, a form of compression was often used in which only some of the pixels were transmitted. These images require at least 2x2 binning to look sharp.

[Gladstoner]

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[elakdawalla]

I've placed all the Earth and Venus flyby data online in PNG format (many many thanks once again to Bjorn for IMG2PNG!) here:

Data from MESSENGER's Cameras

Also, here's a new explainer on the MDIS camera system.

Comments welcome!

--Emily

[ugordan]

I've placed all the Earth and Venus flyby data online in PNG format (many many thanks once again to Bjorn for IMG2PNG!) here:

Is that calibrated data? I see it's not flatfielded, but are other calibration steps performed?

I'm asking so I don't have to reinvent the wheel on my side.

P.S. Just a tiny nitpick there, Emily. It says the Venus outbound movie was taken in ultraviolet and infrared filters. MDIS doesn't have a UV filter, the shortest wavelength is WAC filter F, 430 nm which is violet-ish.

P.P.S. In the MDIS description page (which, btw, also refers to F filter as ultraviolet), "Each pixel is digitized to 12 bits, so an uncompressed, 1024-pixel-square image would occupy 12 Megabytes on the solid-state recorder". That should read 12 Megabits, although the recorders probably are 8-bit aligned so it would be 16 bits per pixel uncompressed, or 2 Megabytes per image of onboard storage.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

IMG2PNG is not yet capable of calibrating MDIS images so I assume the images are not calibrated. I will be adding MDIS calibration to IMG2PNG sometime in the next several weeks.

[peter59]

Many people consider the Earth and Moon to be a double planet system, I too.

Earth and Moon (I hope it's not a star) visible from 100 million kilometers.

[peter59]

Earth and Moon, more images.

[4th rock from th...]

Here's an attempt at a real color (630,560,480 filters) flat fielded and gamma corrected Venus image. Interesting subtle details and color variations.

[ugordan]

Interesting. Where did you get the flatfields?

[4th rock from th...]

The flat fields were made from the closest Venus images indicated as "flat". Not 100% correct but they remove the dust spots.

[JRehling]

I love this. It may not be fancy, but it feels true. When I get some time, I'll try to clone the edges and turn it into an uncropped version. THAT is what Venus looks like. It's taken 45 years of Venus exploration to get this view.

[peter59]

I just found fantastic image.

Earth and Moon. Image EN0024331173M. Day 131/2005

[ugordan]

I just found fantastic image.

Those are all frames in the animation in my post #302 of this thread (the second link).

Here's a flicker between two NAC opnavs taken almost precisely one day apart showing cloud motion and some slight perspective shift due to spacecraft motion, both frames resized to the large one:

[nprev]

MESSENGER results may help identify Mercurian meteorites, which may reach Earth in greater quantities then originally thought:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/15665687.html

[elakdawalla]

There's a new image released, showing one of the dark-halo craters near the south pole. Here's the context (including some but not all of the footprints of other released images):


I tried to overlay the color from the global color image onto the new release, but the geometry is different enough that I'm having a tough time lining things up -- I'm not very good at stretching and warping images to match with each other. Is anyone else interested in giving it a go?

--Emily