Wonderful!! I think this is the first time I have seen this mosaic without it being horribly saturated, and the color makes it even better. I love the pieces of ridges crossing rafts.

Every fine image from a Galilean moon that I see at UMSF makes me want to go back to Jupiter and do the Galileo mission properly, with a working HGA...

(Sigh)...me too, Emily, me too. Sure wish we'd see something like that proposed in the RFP cycles...could probably do it on a less-than-Flagship budget these days.

It would also be nice to have a few 10s of kilos of Pu-238.

Nice work! here is my version from the Atlas of Galilean Satellites for comparison. scaled by 50% for upload

OK, that's pretty super too. I need to get my hands on a copy of that book. The guy running the booth at DPS/EPSC had packed up his display copies before I had a chance to bat my eyelashes at him and wheedle it out of him. (I did have success with that tactic at the Springer booth, got me the display copy of Michael Carroll's latest book, Drifting on Alien Winds. I've *really* been enjoying that one.)

Wow - there are some substantial shadows there. How much vertical relief are we looking at on the edge of some of those....islands....rafts....Europabergs?

P

I can help with this little bit
Actually my new blog entry (planned) is about stereoscopic images from this mosaic. That mosaic has "only" supporting role (but at the end, it is better than I expected).
I think, that some cliffs are significantly more than 100 meters high and some are nearly vertical.
Little preview:

To some extent there is hope for that with the flyby-oriented mission mentioned here:
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/10/...ew-options.html
... a relatively heartening post. Interesting idea to split the super-rad-hard science that must be on an orbiter from the less-rad-hard science that can be on a Galileo-like flyby tour. Seems like a reasonable economy and not a false one.

Also... fantastic mosaics!

I would love to see a Galileo-2 type mission. The Galileo team did, one could argue, almost too good a job salvaging science, making the false impression that we have really done an orbital tour of the Jovian system.

I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but one of the ways they are making that flyby mission so low cost is by dropping Jupiter-system science.

Yes - and this is evident from the fact that the instruments are clearly optimized for close flybys only. For example, the camera has a field of view of 50 degrees (or something similar; I don't remember the exact number). After reading the orbiter and flyby PDFs I'd prefer flying the orbiter first, mainly because of my interest in a Galileo 2 style mission (there is no chance of a mission like that in the near future but no one knows what things are going to be like 10-20 years from now). Despite my interest in a 'Galileo 2', I think splitting the mission into an orbiter and a flyby spacecraft makes a lot of sense. The orbiter then becomes a Europa-specialized element.

One thing though: It now seems that ESA may do something 'Galileo 2-like' with JUICE (if that mission gets selected).


I agree with Ted that the Galileo team performed a miracle in salvaging science but one of the consequences of the HGA failure is still that there is very limited stereo coverage of the Galileans (compare this with Cassini where there is a lot of stereo coverage for all of the icy satellites - for e.g. Rhea the coverage is global). So how are you getting stereoscopic images of Conamara Chaos? I don't think there's any stereo coverage there although I need to check this more carefully. This terrain was imaged during the E6 and E12 flybys and the viewing geometry was different but unfortunately the lighting geometry was different too so I don't think E6 and E12 can be used as stereo pairs (maybe I should try it though just in case).

Hmm, it looks "tasty".



It's kind of manual rewarping high resolution data to lower resolution one. It's difficult and time consuming and this is reason why I'll planned only one image from 5-images mosaic in stereo for now (but complete mosaic could be done in stereo).
And overlapping parts have evidently enough change in viewing geometry, that it's possible to make 4 small stereoscopy images (one of them is on the top of this page).
This is by the way good test for rewarping method.

New stereograms (both anaglyph and cross-eye versions) from Europa (with Conamara Chaos mosaic and others):

Wow, this looks awesome, both the images/mosaics and stereograms. Do you have any idea of how accurate the stereograms are? At least they look realistic.

I have now 'discovered' that there actually is stereo coverage of Conamara Chaos but unfortunately it's not the very hi-res E12 stuff - it's E6 images from ~19000 and ~6600 km. I'll run it through my stereo software one day but I don't know when - I have a big 'queue' of close to one thousand (!) images I want to run through stereo and/or shape from shading software. Doing shape from shading might be interesting as well but a possible problem there is albedo variations. Regarding the E12 images I suspect the viewing geometry for the adjacent, partially overlapping images in the E12 mosaic is too similar for stereo but I'm going to check it.

And finally let's not forget this great stuff from Paul Schenk:

http://stereomoons.blogspot.com/2009/09/br...mara-chaos.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N6UmW3yh1A

Thanks,
Accuracy of the stereograms Fig.5 and Fig.6 is dependent on the precision of my eyes and my experience.
Stereograms are made by warping in Sqirlz Morph using manually added control points. With these images, I achieved my personal record - more than 1800 control points.

"I have now 'discovered' that there actually is stereo coverage of Conamara Chaos but unfortunately it's not the very hi-res E12 stuff - it's E6 images from ~19000 and ~6600 km."

I used image, 7513R from orbit E6. This image covers whole mosaic, so theoretically whole mosaic can be done in stereo with similar results to Fig.5/6.

"And finally let's not forget this great stuff from Paul Schenk:"

Yes, I know his masterful work, after all Paul Schenk is guru of DEM models. This is reason why I'm doing stereograms and not DEMs.

I made little comparison, with similar geometry, between stereogram from two images with ~same resolution (1900 and 1913 from orbit E12, Fig.3) and
manually warped version (Fig.5), so you can judge both versions. Fig.3 is right image and Fig.5 is left image.

I think I would go blind.

I'm pleased, that someone has clue, how painful job this is.

Your pain is our gain!

Awesome, thanks.

To celebrate the selection of JUICE, I have a new Galileo Europa post up on my blog.

Very nice image that initially confused me a lot since I'm familiar with all of the Galileo global color coverage of Europa (or so I think). When I read where the color is from things became more clear.

It is of course very approximate since the color data comes from very different illumination conditions. When it comes to Galileo data, one is often forced to really push things. I've tried for years to make a good fit for this, and it required fiddling with the gamma in the image and with a bit of filtering to compensate for the luminosity being based entirely on a violet filter image. This is the first version that didn't look to badly "off." Here is another version, on that might be my favorite, that is aesthetically slightly better.

Click to view attachment

And there's my new desktop. Thanks, Ted!

Your welcome...now if Juno and JUICE would hurry up

I should add that I removed noise by hand. There was a lot of noise in the image, but no automated removal did a good job removing it without wrecking havoc on the little ridges.

Beautiful image, Ted!

It is from orbit E17, isn't it?

BTW, for JUICE is planned NAC camera with 5 microrad resolution.
With this camera, JUICE will obtain two times better images of Europa even from the orbit around Ganymede (and with many filters).

Yes, that's it. Thanks. Trying to turn that violet image into a good "gray" image was a pain. I have made several previous attempts that were much less successful.
Wow, I hadn't read the specifications. Looking at the time this was taken, soon afterwards Europa transited Jupiter. Had Galileo had a working antenna, it would have made for one of the most spectacular movies ever.

This is a mosaic of the Galileo I25 Europa images:

Click to view attachment

The 12 images comprising the mosaic were obtained on November 25, 1999 at a distance of 96000 km from Europa. This is the only good global coverage of Europa's Jupiter facing hemisphere. For aesthetic purposes I filled some narrow horizontal gaps by cloning nearby data.

For many years I have wanted to do something with the Europa images but didn't, mainly because a new mission that can image Europa at high resolution didn't seem that far in the future (a decade or so until Jupiter arrival isn't that much in this context). But now I have given up waiting - by now it has become pretty clear that nothing of significance is going to happen until almost 20 years from now when JUICE arrives at Jupiter. The good thing though is that this mission seems very likely to actually happen - more likely than previous mission concepts ever have been.

Because of this long time until the next spacecraft that can obtain hi-res images of Europa arrives I decided to start work on a 16384x8192 pixel global map of Europa using all of the useful Galileo and Voyager images. This mosaic is a 'by-product' from that project.

Interestingly the only mosaic I have found from the I25 data is only 900x900 pixels and has obvious seams since the brightness of the original images is variable:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02528

Great work! Oh, and I for some reason thought that this mosaic was much more spotty than this...wheels are turning in my head...

Wow, Bjorn, that is beautiful! Really makes me want to go through the Galilean imagery and play around. Can't wait to see the final product!

Wow, really great job ! A stupid question: is it possible to overlay color data from lower resolution color pictures or are they of too low resolution ?
Thanks again for these amazing pictures.
Marc.

That's a lovely mosaic Bjorn: it really highlights some of the very subtle European topography, particularly the arc-like 'trenches' near the terminator.