[X] My Assistant

[GregM]

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[Phil Stooke]

It's show and tell time.. I guess. Here's another new version of some historic images...



It's a polar projection of one of the Apollo 17 Station 6 panoramas taken at Split Rock on the slope of North Massif. The astronaut is at the center, standing on the rim of a small crater west of the rock. The rover and the other astronaut (Schmitt, I think, I don't have my notes with me) are downhill from the center of the scene. The reprojection exaggerates horizon topography in a rather bizarre way, but this is really intended for mapping in the vicinity of the science station.

Phil

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This is extremely impressive, IMHO especially peter59's work with the Mariner 6 & 7 images.

I have also been processing some old images, mainly from the Voyagers:

http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/images/

I have more that I'll put online someday. I have also scanned all Pioneer 10 & 11 images I could find. Many of these I have not seen online. I will probably add these to my website one day but I would just love to have these in digital form instead of scanned. Modern computers and software can do miracles, what I've seen here is much better than NASA's processing a few decades (!) ago.

I also recently downloaded all of the Mariner 10 images and have been playing with them. BTW are the earlier Mariner (4, 6 and 7) imaging datasets not available online - only on CDs ?

[tedstryk]

This is extremely impressive, IMHO especially peter59's work with the Mariner 6 & 7 images.

I have also been processing some old images, mainly from the Voyagers:

http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/images/

I have more that I'll put online someday. I have also scanned all Pioneer 10 & 11 images I could find. Many of these I have not seen online. I will probably add these to my website one day but I would just love to have these in digital form instead of scanned. Modern computers and software can do miracles, what I've seen here is much better than NASA's processing a few decades (!) ago.

I also recently downloaded all of the Mariner 10 images and have been playing with them. BTW are the earlier Mariner (4, 6 and 7) imaging datasets not available online - only on CDs ?

I have two projects of my own underway. First, I have some Surveyor 7 stuff that I am scanning that I intend to process. Secondly, I have some digital data for two or three Pioneer images from Saturn (I say two or three because there is one shot that may be a fragment of one of the other two - I need to check carefully). The problem is that it is in paper form, so this will take a lot of work.

[GregM]

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[dvandorn]

<snip> I have always felt that Pioneer 10 & 11 never has recieved the attention or accolades that they deserved. The first spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn for heaven's sakes! Part of the reason for that was that the imaging was very tricky, and never really processed very well compared with what could be done with today's technology.

The problem was more that the imagery was crude and nearly an afterthought -- it was crude by the standards of the time in which it was built.

The Pioneers were limited in that they were primarily fields-and-particles sensors. The magnetometers, especially, worked a lot better on a spinning spacecraft. And it's really tricky to develop a stationary, pointable scan platform on a spinning spacecraft. The Voyagers managed it, but they're bigger, better spacecraft than the earlier Pioneers.

So, since it was just cost- and weight-prohibitive to equip Pioneer with a stationary scan platform, the best they could do to provide imagery was to place a photometer on it and have the Pioneer's own spin scan the photometer through its field of view, one line per rev. The photometer was "nodded" on each scan to get an adjacent line.

That kind of imaging is rather inherently crude and low-resolution. It needed an awful lot of correction, because of precession of the spacecraft spin and the distance the spacecraft traveled relative to its target during the time it took to build up a single image.

But it was a HECK of a lot better than nothing!

-the other Doug