Pioneer 10 Jupiter Options

[jrdahlman]

Giving up on Mariner 4, I've gone back to Pioneer. Since everybody seems focussed on Pioneer 11 Saturn, I thought I'd switch to Pioneer 10 and 1973's Jupiter. Here are the results of my investigations.

As I mentioned, While the original digital data is Who Knows Where, the NSSDC does contain black-and-white negatives of them. It costs $10 each, and you need to pay for two of them for every image if you want separate Red and Blue records. I've splurged and paid $50 for 2 1/2 Pioneer 10 images.

Pioneer 10 b/w images are available at:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Master...g?ds=PSPG-00031

They are some 8x10's, with many more 5x7's available, and Bob Tice at NSSDC was kind enough to tell me what's still available for scanning. (Bob says I'm the first to ask about these in many years. He's been doing high-quality Apollo scans for the last 4 years solid, so he welcomes any break from lunar pictures!)

Pioneer 10 pictures are labelled Ax or Bx, and the A's head toward Jupiter and count DOWN (A104-A1), while the B's are heading away from Jupiter and count up (B1-B76). (Pioneer 11 uses C & D.) Most are still available: down to A4, and B6 & up. Sadly, A2 (a motion-distorted close-up of the Red Spot), seems to be Gone Forever. There are separate "R" & "B" versions of most images for the red & blue filter.

The NASA Pioneer book gives a list of all images taken here:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/app2.htm

but, to my amazement, none of the pictures in that book are keyed to that list! You're on your own as far as guessing what number matches to what image. (The NSSDC have no thumbnails.)

Fortunately, one of you in this forum mentioned a special Pioneer issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. It is Volume 79, Number 25, Sept. 1, 1974. "The Imaging Experiment on Pioneer 10" by Swindell & Doose on page 3634 is just full of technical detail that we all love, and even has prints of some raw red & blue images, complete with dropouts--and the A-numbers. That was my only key to which images to order.

(Note: after all my work, and after most of this was written, somebody mentioned Ricardo Nunes's thumbnails at:

http://www.astrosurf.com/nunes/explor/explor_pioneer.htm

Arrrrrg! Wish I'd seen that earlier!)

Pioneer photos are 508 (blue) or 507 (red) by about 250 or so (don't remember) "rolls." Pioneer is spinning around 360 degrees in 12 1/2 seconds. Instead of a camera, it has one light sensor for red and one for blue--one pixel! Each roll is one scan line (actually 14 degrees out of 360), and after each roll the IPP shifts up or down for the next line. (Note that Figure 7-2 of the Nasa book is wrong or seriously misleading.) What's nice is there are no reseau marks to eliminate. What's not nice is that it takes a half-hour to build a picture, and Pioneer is moving while Jupiter turns pretty fast, which makes geometric re-projection painful. Theoretically, each roll can be peeled off and projected on a Jupiter globe separately--get out your Celestias.

I ordered A34R & A34B: full Jupiter with the Red Spot and a few "notches", and A7R & A7B: a close -up of the (I think) upper hemisphere. I deliberately picked images with "notches" so I'd know exactly were the scan lines would fall. I also wanted A5, but that was only available as a color press-release photo. (Got it.) Though split into R&B, these NSSDC negatives are not quite "raw"--it's mentioned they have a "1-D geometric stretch," and I see dropouts in the JGR that I don't see in my copies.

This post is getting pretty long, so I'll do the actual pictures in the next post.


By the way, I would LOVE to get a reprint of the Pioneer 10 JGR special issue. The raw prints on pages 3638-3644 just beg to be scanned. I don't know if would be ethical to post my Xeroxes of them, and anyway Xeroxes look really crappy. (Annoyingly, there apparently never were any Pioneer 11 articles in JGR, and the Science articles have almost zilch pictures.)

The NSSDC scanned negatives were scanned as positives and came as 50 Meg TIFF files--which is WAY overkill for Pioneer's resolution. I immediately reduced them to 15% of original, and that's what you'll find from my website. (They give me a 25-Meg maximum.) Email me at jrdahlman@netscape.net if you want full-size PNG's, or worse, the TIFF's.

Check http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/app2.htm for details about spacecraft location for each image.

I can NOT figure out thumbnails, so all I can provide is links:

A34 Red:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34R.jpg JPEG version
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34R15pc.png PNG version

A34 Blue:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34B.jpg JPEG version
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34B15pc.png PNG version


A7 Red:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A7R.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A7R15pc.png

A7 Blue:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A7B.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A7B15pc.png


A5 in color (I think it's sideways):

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A5.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A5col15pc.png
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/Pioneer10_07_col_A5.jpg
(Throw in the full-size for good measure.)

Unfortunately, the automatic contrast on the scanner threw out a lot of contrast on the planet--A34 red in particular looks like a white ball. I'm afraid I threw a fit, and Bob kindly rescanned the A34's at no additional charge. They came much grainer, however! I did an "average pixel resample" in the reduction to 15%, and most of the grain disappeared.

A34 "a" version Red:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34Ra.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34Ras15pc.png

A34 "a" version Blue:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34Ba.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34Bas15pc.png


Tried overlapping these for color using Fake Green (50% red, 50% blue--please re-balance!). That just showed me they don't quite line up:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34misreggrainy.png
http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34misregsoft.png
(You can see the difference between the orginally grainy ones and my smoothing.)

More carefully line-up, it's still not perfect. I think one needs to be rotated, which is beyond my hand-eye coordination. Here's my best attempt:

http://home.comcast.net/~jrdahlman/A34a.jpg

Anyway, enjoy!


(Thought I did two posts, and it came out as one big one. Oh well.)