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Posted by: J.J. Jan 25 2007, 01:36 AM

I don't know if anyone's posted this yet...but it's definitely worth a re-post.

I figured they would try something like this again.

http://geekcounterpoint.net/files/category-10.html

Just wait until they turn that bad boy towards Earth...

[Edit: Image no longer available]

Posted by: RedSky Jan 25 2007, 02:36 AM

Very nice. Of course, if they look at earth when it is closest... we will only be seen as a thin cresent.

Posted by: Decepticon Jan 25 2007, 09:47 AM

I wonder if Moonshine would help a little?

Posted by: djellison Jan 25 2007, 10:01 AM

Well - given that photographing the Moon with Earthshine results in the normal part of the Earth being totally bleached out - I doubt it. I imagine that there's a fairly big "keep out" zone for HiRISE pointing when it comes to the Sun - and at a time when Moonshine would be most usefull, chances are they'd be in that keep out zone.

Doug

Posted by: monitorlizard Jan 25 2007, 11:54 AM

I've often wondered if it would be worth the effort for HiRISE to attempt to image Mars-crossing asteroids. The orbits of most asteroids should be very well known, considering how many spacecraft have had to cross the asteroid belt, and the searches made for close flybys. So it follows that the ones that come near Mars should be traceable. I don't know if MRO could slew fast enough to avoid image smear, but it just might result in a few spectacular images, given HiRISE's resolution.

Posted by: djellison Jan 25 2007, 12:09 PM

They would have to be very very close for it to be worthwhile - and you'd have to make an excellent case for the off-nominal sequencing involved.

Doug

Posted by: tedstryk Jan 25 2007, 12:58 PM

Ikonos, SpaceImaging's earth-observing satellite has cameoed as a planetary observer. The Jupiter and Saturn pics were taken during its commissioning - It had some real problems with Saturn's low surface brightness, and badly underexposed the image. However, Jupiter turned out really well (and, for the record, the moon to the right of Jupiter is Io). The images of Mars were taken during the 2003 opposition.

Posted by: djellison Jan 25 2007, 01:34 PM

I can't believe what thought process just went through my head.

"Oh yeah - that Ikonos image is the same sort of quality for Jupiter as HiRISE managed. Those Mars pics from Ikonos are good - I wonder what Mars would look like through HiRISE"

Duhhh



Doug

Posted by: tedstryk Jan 25 2007, 03:04 PM

To be fair, orbital positions have to be taken into account. When Ikonos imaged Jupiter on October 27, 1999, it was 49.7" across as seen from earth, or you could say it covered 1940 square arc seconds.. From Mars, on January 11, 2007, when this image was taken, Jupiter was 50.9" across, or 2035 square arc seconds. In other words, its disk was only 4.9 percent larger. Keep in mind that my math is very crude here, but the proportions are right. I worked with Jupiter as a sphere, ignoring polar flattening.

Posted by: tuvas Jan 25 2007, 03:27 PM

That is correct. I beleive the zone is a 20 degree away from the sun keep-out zone, so it might be quite difficult. Even harder when you consider we've already taken a picture of the moon, on our way out of the Earth-moon system (Before I was a part of HiRISE...). This just happened to be a time when we had a stellar Calibration the same time as an opening to Jupiter, a lot of things that came up lucky.

BTW, I don't think this picture has been officially released yet...

Posted by: djellison Jan 25 2007, 04:17 PM

Yup - not properly released. The UMSF policy on this is something we've discussed as an admin team given that - to be fair - HiROC is about as leakproof as a teabag and we've just about run out of fingers to count the number of times things have got 'out' before they should have.

If someone spots something that hasn't been released and posts to it directly from UMSF - we cull that - that's someone at UMSF doing something they probably shouldn't and in doing so, UMSF becomes part of the problem - and we try to tell someone appropriate ( usually via Jason ).

If some other site has been sent something - that's fine by me as UMSF isn't involved directly.

Doug

Posted by: tuvas Jan 25 2007, 04:21 PM

Sounds fair to me, and I do have it confirmed that it hasn't been released yet. The official release should be a bit better than these previews, I would guess.

Posted by: Lorne Ipsum Jan 25 2007, 04:21 PM

Apparently not -- at least, I've been told it's the case by the U of A, so I'll be taking down my page containing it. I received the image about 4th hand, without any "do not distribute" language attached. Sure wish unreleased images had a watermark or something...

Lorne

Posted by: tuvas Jan 25 2007, 04:37 PM

Thanks for the quick removal. It's nice to see sources that remove unreleased images before they are released. But I can tell you that likely the image will be officially released sometime soon.

The problem is the unreleased images are quickly created, and passed to the team. A few team members decide, hey I can pass this on to my friends and family, it won't matter, and then someone there forwards it on to someone who owns a major website. So...

Posted by: JRehling Jan 25 2007, 05:11 PM

[...]

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jan 25 2007, 05:57 PM

Ikonos also picked up some nice Lunar images - I'll have a look for the link later...

...I wonder whether HiRise will have a good view of Saturn, or indeed A Certain Comet at any point?


Bob Shaw

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jan 25 2007, 06:03 PM

I have a liiiiiittle list of candidates (I would say 'volunteers', but that might not be entirely accurate) for the crew of the first Jupiter-orbit HST Servicing Mission... ...no, truth to tell, it's quite a *big* list! Politicos make great crew for risky flights - they're so, well, disposable...


Bob Shaw

Posted by: JRehling Jan 25 2007, 06:55 PM

[...]

Posted by: Phil Stooke Jan 25 2007, 07:15 PM

Yes, that's a fantasy all right.

Phil

Posted by: J.J. Jan 25 2007, 10:55 PM

I apologize for any role I had in this...I had no idea about UMSF's image policy, which I can understand given proprietary concerns. I just thought "cool!" and fired it off; for me to be first would've been too good to be true. Seriously though...I apologize.

I must say that it gave me pause to find nothing about this on any other website (namely this one), sites run by people far deeper into the space probe pipeline than I've ever been.

Speaking of Jupiter, though...I remember a long time time (I mean, like 10 years ago) they were proposing an inexpensive space telescope that would do *nothing* but look at Jupiter. I thought the idea was capital, but like most of the proposed missions that I think are cool, it was never selected. I still think it's a great idea, though...imagine the diffraction-limited movies a space-based 16-incher could give us.

Posted by: Bart Jan 25 2007, 11:32 PM

I can't wait to see this Jupiter picture, but in the meantime, some of the posts in this thread got me thinking about other possible targets. It looks to me like MRO could be in a position to take some nifty pictures of Ceres later this year (August-ish) at a resolution near 20 km/pixel. If I did the numbers right, this would be better than the Hubble pictures at the value of 30 km/pixel quoted in wikipedia.

Bart

EDIT: D'oh! My bad! I was off by a factor of 10. Only 200 km/pixel.

Posted by: ugordan Jan 26 2007, 09:21 AM

And imagine the downlink rates at Jupiter via Hubble's antenna!

*cough*GALILEO*cough*...

Posted by: Decepticon Jan 26 2007, 10:06 AM

I would love to see this!!!!

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jan 26 2007, 12:01 PM

That's OK, George and the boys would have erected a nice big hi-gain antenna on an EVA. Hopefully they'd get it to point in the right direction.


Bob shaw

Posted by: RubberoidLifeform Jan 26 2007, 07:47 PM

I wish there was some way these types of threads could be flagged as "hoax", or "no longer valid" or some such wording. The first post mentions images of Jupiter but when I go to the link, there's nothing. I've read through and now understand (I think) what happened, but how about putting a note a the beginning to that effect?

Don't mean to complain - I've enjoyed following the discussions immensly. Also, you might have some mechanism in place that I'm not aware of. If so, please let me know.

Thanks.

Posted by: climber Jan 26 2007, 08:03 PM

Image have been deleted from where the first link point for the reason you know... since you've red all the thread

Posted by: tuvas Jan 26 2007, 09:04 PM

If, and I stress, if HiRISE were to do such a picture again, one of three things would have to happen.

1. It would have to be an extremely high priority, known about weeks or longer in advance, or
2. It would have to be near the next stellar callibration (Which I beleive is in early July).
3. The object would have to be in Martian orbit (I know there are a few calibration images of Deimos and Phobos, but they are rare).

It is very difficult to plan an image that isn't pointing at Mars, there is a pretty large list of flight rules that have to be check to make sure they aren't violated, stuff like making sure it's not pointed at the sun, etc. The Jupiter image took well over a month to plan, be tested on the OTB (Basically a MRO simulator, used to make sure the spacecraft won't crash), and be uploaded to the spacecraft. I'm not saying it can't happen, just that it would take something pretty important to go through so much hassle.

Posted by: djellison Jan 26 2007, 09:18 PM

Indeed - there isn't a specific way to do that, but the initial poster could edit his post to make clear that it's not available anymore.

Doug

Posted by: Decepticon Jan 27 2007, 06:57 PM

Will this image be available soon? Was Jupiter imaged at all? Very confusing.

Posted by: djellison Jan 27 2007, 06:59 PM

It was imaged, a picture leaked onto a different website, then realised it shouldn't have been made public, so taken off again......and sooner or later HiROC will release it properly

Doug

Posted by: tuvas Jan 27 2007, 10:21 PM

Most likely in the next week.

Posted by: tuvas Jan 31 2007, 05:09 PM

http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/PSP/diafotizo.php?ID=PSP_002162_9030

Now released in it's full glory!

Posted by: volcanopele Jan 31 2007, 05:14 PM

Nice work. You can see what I referred to as a "brown barge" just below the Great Red Spot in this image.

Posted by: ustrax Jan 31 2007, 05:16 PM

I can almost listen New Horizons saying:
I'm ready for the close-up Mr. HiRise!

Fantastic image!

Posted by: elakdawalla Jan 31 2007, 05:40 PM

I'm trying to figure out which moons are which in this image. They didn't include the date and time in the caption (I've sent an email and got an immediate reply that they'd figure it out and post it) -- but I'm wondering, tuvas or volcanopele, if either of you have figured that out already?

--Emily

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Jan 31 2007, 05:49 PM

They're...

Oops, I'm sorry. I see that you asked tuvas or volcanopele

Posted by: elakdawalla Jan 31 2007, 05:50 PM

Ha ha ha. Very funny.

GuyMac got back to me already, actually: 2007-01-11 21:02:51

--Emily

Posted by: ngunn Jan 31 2007, 10:43 PM

This magnificent image makes me want to see an 'Earth and Moon' from HiRISE.

Posted by: JRehling Feb 1 2007, 12:05 AM

[...]

Posted by: jamescanvin Feb 1 2007, 12:18 AM

What would be real cool is if simultaneous observations could be done with HiRISE and Hubble to get stereo images of the outer planets.

James

Posted by: elakdawalla Feb 1 2007, 12:22 AM

I can see the headlines now:

"Hubble and Mars Orbiter Prove Uranus Is Round"



--Emily

Posted by: mars loon Feb 1 2007, 12:55 AM

Fantastic image ! I'd like to see Saturn, Ceres and Vesta

Now replying to an earlier post ......

Well the list of "volunteers" for Bob's mission has grown considerably today; in the form of "visionless" NASA budget cutters

http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/0131_Congressional_Appropriators_Cut_NASA.html
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3846

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 1 2007, 01:08 AM

http://uanews.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/UANews.woa/2/wa/SRStoryDetails?ArticleID=13539
By Lori Stiles
University of Arizona News Services
January 31, 2007

Posted by: JRehling Feb 1 2007, 03:54 AM

Actually, you can use one viewpoint and just wait for the planet in question to rotate, which doesn't take long. If you take images of any of these planets 45 minutes apart or so, you have all you need to make a 3D picture. There's a little tiny glitch due to the Sun seeming to be in two different positions, but with the Lambertian nature of clouds this is more of a theoretical problem.

The practical problem in most cases is that the giant planets are mainly pretty bland.

With Saturn, you can take pictures some YEARS apart to get a 3D image of the rings. There are some good examples out there -- you have to turn the image 90 degrees from the usual presentation to get the effect since that's the way the planet's plane "rotates" with respect to us.

Posted by: JRehling Feb 1 2007, 04:11 AM

[...]

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 1 2007, 04:56 AM

So, what you're really asking all of us is, does this data make Uranus look fat???



-the other Doug

p.s. -- those of us guys who have ever been married already know how to answer that question...

Posted by: mchan Feb 1 2007, 07:16 AM

Technically speaking, if Uranus looks fat...

Posted by: paxdan Feb 1 2007, 08:31 AM

no no no, it's: "does my planet look big in this?"

Posted by: Ant103 Feb 1 2007, 05:43 PM

Hum... I made a better picture with my 130 mm reflector with a Toucam2 in raw mode

...

Seriously, this image is fantastic . I'm waiting for an Earth-and-moon-imaging Hirise release -_-

Posted by: csq246 Feb 1 2007, 11:08 PM

Hi I'm new, but I figured I might as well jump in now; Do you think it's possible that they could turn it towards Pluto?

Posted by: tuvas Feb 1 2007, 11:13 PM

It is possible, but not likely. Jupiter was deemed worth the risk because of it's large size, moons, and the fact that it is a fair amount closer from Mars than from Earth, so we could get a decent picture out of it. Also, it helped to do characterization of the camera, because of it's well-known colors in various wavelengths. Pluto is small, very far away, and all in all, it'd only be a few pixels across, if that. It hasn't been as well characterized, and there isn't an advantage to looking at it from Mars, it just doesn't do anything different.

As an aside, Jason says now he's more interested in HiRISE because it's taken a photo of a "worthy" planet.

Posted by: nprev Feb 3 2007, 03:40 AM

I don't think that using HiRSE for NMO object detection would be a prudent use of this asset during its primary mission, but if we get lucky & MRO is as long-lived as MGS it surely might be a worthy objective of an extended mission. MGS gave some tantalizing hints of the impact rate on Mars, and assessing this risk/opportunity(? ) would add lots of immediate value for future manned exporation plans as well as context data for Mars' recent geology.

OT, but for some reason, I'm reminded of the wonderful 1964 movie Robinson Caruso on Mars, and the frequent meteor impacts...

Posted by: JRehling Feb 3 2007, 05:37 AM

[...]

Posted by: tuvas Feb 3 2007, 03:04 PM

Actually, most HiRISE/CTX/CRISM pictures are taken off-NADIR, only SHARAD, MARCI, and MCO are anything else. MCO doesn't count either, as it moves on it's own...

Posted by: GuyMac Feb 4 2007, 12:58 AM

There is a http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/releases/index.shtml BTW.