Enceladus August 11, 2008 encounter, Close-up observations of plume vents Options

[remcook]

lots of blank white images of Enceladus in the raws...I wonder what's the cause of those.

[jmknapp]

JPL news release:

Shorty after 9:03 p.m. Pacific Time, the Cassini spacecraft began sending data to Earth following a close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus. During closest approach, Cassini successfully passed only 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the surface of the tiny moon.

Cassini's signal was picked up by the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, and relayed to the Cassini mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"We are happy to report that Cassini's begun sending data home," said Julie Webster, Cassini team chief at JPL. "The downlink will continue through the night and into tomorrow morning.”

[tedstryk]

Someone on Enceladus was having fun pointing a laser pointer in Cassini's camera!

[Floyd]

If i'm reading the timeline from the Mission Description page correctly, the images we have are from the first (3 hr)downlink (pre encounter). The second (5 hr) downlink should have reached the ground a few hours ago. The third (9 hr) downlink is currently in progress and should finish about 7 hours after the time of this post. Hopefully there are a bunch of images on the completed second downlink which they will post soon.
-Floyd

[volcanopele]

No images from the second downlink that I can see. I'm sure they will all show up in the 9 hour downlink (which actually starts up in a little under 1 hour).

[jasedm]

See post 45 above - looks like it will be tomorrow morning before the very close shots appear (but we may get the Northern hemisphere shots prior to that )

[volcanopele]

I know that My point was that the "we may get northern hemisphere images earlier" idea looks to not be correct. But it will just carry over to this next playback.

[ugordan]

See post 45 above - looks like it will be tomorrow morning before the very close shots appear (but we may get the Northern hemisphere shots prior to that )

Why tomorrow morning? Anne Verbiscer said 1800 UTC today. Which is in a little less than two hours.

[volcanopele]

Not sure where 1800 UTC came from. The 9 hour long playback hasn't started yet (20 minutes to go!). The images from that playback will show up on the JPL raw images page and the CICLOPS page at 0530 UTC (or thereabouts, that's the earliest) Tomorrow. No images other than the 2.5 km/pixel distant "plume tendril" observations are available at the moment.

[ugordan]

I guess the ISS playback wasn't scheduled to start until about an hour into that 9 hr long playback or something.

How come there'll be such a long delay for the raws? Typically they show up as soon as they get down, you can sometimes actually catch the raw page being updated every minute with new images.

[volcanopele]

The images on the raw images page shows up 4 hours after the playback ends. That isn't part of the real-time stream.

[Mariner9]

We are all getting spoiled. Remember how agonizingly slow it was waiting for Galileo images to get downloaded (at around 3 images per day)? Worse than that, during the first few orbits they were saved up until a press conference announcing the latest discoveries.

But at least you could eventually get to all of the images on the web, as opposed to the old days of Voyager where only a subset were published in magazines or books.

So.... much as I really, really, really want to see the closeups of Enceladus, I guess I'll just have to wait another 24 hours or so.

[peter59]

Que sera ? Big disappointment or images like this artist's painting :
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...fm?imageID=3039

[vmcgregor]

Approach images are now going to the raw image page. More will be coming!

[ugordan]

Yay! I was hoping they'd pull something like this to cut down the wait for the public. Looks like outbound images at that, I thought we'd be seeing the inbound imagery first as that was scheduled to be downloaded first.