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

[peter59]

The ISS volumes Coiss_2026 and Coiss_2027 are now available from
PDS Planetary Rings Node in zipped form (convenient for downloading).

Coiss_2026 and Coiss_2027 in zipped form

[Bjorn Jonsson]

There is an early 'Christmas present' at the PDS: The January 1, 2008 data release (ISS and VIMS) is already there. I have managed to take a quick look at all of the ISS images and post a summary at http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/css_stuff/im...s_overview.html . This also includes all of the earlier ISS data volumes.

With the exception of Titan, there are very few interesting satellite images this time, Cassini's orbit was highly inclined. The most interesting ones are probably the ones of Hyperion in coiss_2029\data\1550261798_1550410364 (mentioned by Emily in this thread).

There is heavy emphasis on the rings with lots of various movies including F ring movies, spoke movies etc. plus lots of multispectral coverage showing both the lit side and the unlit side. There are also many interesting images of Saturn, mainly WAC images. These include great images of the south pole obtained at high inclination. There are several images there that I'm going to process when I have the time (probably immediately after Christmas).

Updates to the Cassini image database (see this thread for further details) are available at the following URLs for volumes coiss_2028, coiss_2029 and coiss_2030 respectively:

http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/cas...ta/index_28.zip
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/cas...ta/index_29.zip
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/cas...ta/index_30.zip

[ugordan]

Lot of good stuff in this PDS release. Your summary page is very helpful, particularly before the new data becomes searchable on the PDS.
Here's a quick Saturn composite, just part of a sequence of color ring plane crossing Ian Regan animated back in the day:

[edstrick]

"....There is heavy emphasis on the rings with lots of various movies including F ring movies, spoke movies etc. plus lots of multispectral coverage ..."

My recollection is that the Voyagers got surprisingly little multispectral coverage of the rings. Imaging sequences concentrated on things like phase and inclination angle, radial structure mapping, etc, followed by the big "spoke movie" from Voyager 2 after the Voyager 1 spoke discovery.

I think I recall that one mision (maybe Voyager 1), got only orange/blue or some such 2-filter moderately high rez color coverage of the rings. I suspect there was no expectation that the rings would have widespread color variation and only minimal effort to check for radial color variations was worth the data-bandwidth.

[tedstryk]

There is definitely a large body of high phase multispectral ring data from Voyager. I am not sure about data taken on approach.

[elakdawalla]

I've made progress on my massive project to make the better images of the icy satellites more accessible to people. I'm not quite done with it -- I still need to sort out and format pages for Phoebe and the rocks, and have a bunch of introductory and explanatory text to write -- but for those of you who don't need any hand-holding to enjoy PNGified versions of every decent-sized icy satellite image in the PDS, here's the work in progress: Selected Data from Cassini's Cameras. I decided to post it now even though it's not done because I think MESSENGER may keep me too busy this week for me to do any more work on it for a bit.

--Emily

[ugordan]

Folks, just a heads up that 3 new ISS DVDs are now available at the PDS, covering a data collection period period of April 1 - June 30, 2007:

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/ca...iter/coiss_2031
http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/ca...iter/coiss_2032
http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/ca...iter/coiss_2033

Just glancing through the index tables, apart from the usual assortment of Titan flyby imagery, Saturn and rings, there are some nice higher resolution multispectral observations of Dione, Tethys, Rhea and Atlas (highest res imagery throughout the mission) and also lower resolution stuff on Mimas and Iapetus (Cassini's first good look at the trailing side), Enceladus low phase observations, couple of mutuals, etc.

Also, new VIMS data is here:
http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/ca...er/covims_0019/

[elakdawalla]

As usual, Bjorn has created updates to the massive Cassini Image database for this latest release. For those of you who haven't seen it before, Bjorn made a Microsoft Access database containing all the metadata for all the images released by Cassini ISS to the Planetary Data System. This database is great because you can construct really quite complex queries and have it spit out lists of images that you might be interested in -- for instance, you could, if you wanted to, find all images that contain both Saturn and Titan that were taken through a RED filter, or find all images of Atlas with resolutions higher than 5 km/pixel, and so on. I use it to produce lists of files that I can then run wget on to automatically download only the images I'm interested in.

I have now created a page on the Society's website that links to the original database and all the updates. Enjoy! And don't forget to check out the pages I made that show all reasonably good images of Saturn's moons (excepting Titan) -- I haven't updated these pages yet with the April 1 release but I'll begin to work on that now that Bjorn's updated the database.

--Emily

[scalbers]

It's amazing that Emily has put these pages together for all the main icy satellites. Nice that the images appear to be more directly usable without the need for 16-bit to 8-bit conversion (or at least my viewers are doing this more easily now). I also note the sub-spacecraft lat/lon that are useful in mapping. I wonder how these were obtained since when I browse the headers on the PDS web pages I usually just see the image center point lat/lon. I see these are listed in the more complete list of header definitions on Emily's page. Just FYI, I also like to use the sub solar lat/lon info for mapping. Kudos to Bjorn as well.

Steve

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I also note the sub-spacecraft lat/lon that are useful in mapping. I wonder how these were obtained...

Everything in the database is taken from the index.tab files - there is one index.tab file for each ISS volume. These files contain a lot more data than the LBL files (or the headers in the IMG files). The database includes everything from the index.tab files.

[elakdawalla]

Here's the best icy moons and rocks stuff from the latest release. --Emily

http://www.planetary.org/data/cassini/u08q2icy/
http://www.planetary.org/data/cassini/u08q2rocks/

[Bjorn Jonsson]

The ISS images for the July-September 2007 period have hit the PDS even though July 1 is several days away. I haven't had time to look at much yet but know there's a lot of interesting stuff there. The highlights I remember are:

* The only targeted Iapetus flyby
* A 5000 km nontargeted Rhea flyby
* A very nice flyby of Dione (~40,000 km IIRC)
* Lots of nice Tethys images
* Several Titan flybys

[ugordan]

Ooh, nice catch, Bjorn. I was checking it myself earlier today and no luck. This is as fresh as it gets

[elakdawalla]

Iapetus!!!! I can't believe it's been long enough since that flyby that the data is on the PDS already. I can't wait to see what you guys produce from that data set.

I'm looking forward to downloading stuff -- but probably can't get to it until this weekend. Bjorn, I'm ready for the database update whenever you get around to it.

--Emily

[ugordan]

A taste of Iapetus data, from the Saturn system PR sequence before C/A. RGB color:

I forgot which star that was to the above right of Iapetus and also apparently another one off the sunlit crescent.

EDIT: Quick regional RGB color on the outbound part and one of the parting shots on the right at 2x:


The dark stuff truly is remarkably gray on the trailing hemisphere. I'm now wondering whether my plan for redoing the big outbound mosaic in approx. natural color is worth the trouble just to get essentially b/w imagery in the end. There are still odd false color high-res mosaics here and there, though, that weren't released officially.