actually… i should just upload it here. will animated gifs work here?


Click to view attachment

mgrodzki, I think you need to run that backwards, I'm pretty sure this is the south polar departure view.
Cool website BTW.

Astro0

argh! 50-50 wrong everytime!

weird. i revised, but in edit mode only one image embed is there yet 2 show up? anyway... the top one if corrected now.

Hi all,

New member here - fist post :)
I made some colour composites of Cassini's raw images. You can see a hint of blue inside some the northern craters. It becomes more obvious when the image is oversaturated in a imageviewing/manipulation program.

Enceladus' north pole seen from ~91000 km.

Filters IR3, GRN, UV3 mapped to R, G and B.
Distance about 91000 km.
Raw-images: N00103753 - 55

The north pole closer - from about 65000 km.

Filters IR3, GRN, UV3, CL mapped to R, G, B and luminosity.
Distance about 65000 km.
Raw-images: N00103763 - 66

South pole area and some tiger stripes seen from about 130000 km.

Filters IR3, GRN, UV3, CL -> RGB+lum.
Distance about 130000 km
Raw-images: N00103775 - 78


I also compiled a flyby-video using the raw images, it's in Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PqLPU2VA4

Yay, first post!
Spin0

Thanks for those spin0, and welcome.
It's useful to see the colour composites as they show the fresher ice more clearly in various features.
I liked your Iapetus flyby composite on youtube too - shows very well the frenetic activity of the cameras during that relatively slow flyby.

Welcome, spin0!
Great color images (I tried to make something similar with UV+Clean+IR of South Pole view, but your results are better!).
I suspect that blue/green features are actually SHADOWs of the plume, based on their position respect to tiger stripes fractures.
Any opinion on this?

PS: mgrodzki, your animations are stunning, bravo!

I have to disagree. It's the coarse ice within the fractures that has a different spectra (notably it's dark in the IR3 deep infrared filter, not particularly so in the IR1 filter) making them blue-green. The plumes are far too dilute to produce any shadowing, in fact they pretty much only scatter light, not block it. Notice there are blue-green fractures to the left as well, far from the pole where the outgassing happens.

BTW, nice work on color registration, Spin0! I think it's funny how the raw contrast stretch algorithm makes it appear Enceladus was illuminated with the usual "white" light from the Sun when in fact the light coming through was pretty yellow/brownish, depending on how much of the illumination is directly due to reflected ringshine. In particular, both the rings and Saturn are dark in the UV3 filter indicating the exposure required was long. And yet, no obvious blur can be seen in the narrow angle. Amazing.

I like the departure/arrival movies! Reminds me of a Fritz Lang movie. German Expressionism meets space exploration.

Hmm I knew the CDA glitch would be focus of any post flyby news coverage.

Cassini probe failed to taste moons geysers in flyby

"Cassini probe failed to 'taste' moon's geysers in flyby"

Sometimes I am disappointed in New Scientist's sensationalist headlines.
I guess they deserve to be compared to the Sun tabloid.

And Slashdot has a similar wrong-headed take on this, based on the New Scientist article.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/03/14/1535236.shtml

Can someone with a Slashdot account go set them straight?

One of the CICLOPS folks did in the last comment. I'll probably respond to him.

totally. i did one with ted stryk’s mariner images to mars a while back too. same weird nickelodeon old tyme effect on space travel. i did “add” a few things to make it smooth. noted on my blog what those items were. essentially 3 frames added to a 10 frame animation.

These are fun images to work on with my map, particularly the north polar ones. First though I see I'll want to retool some of the limb fitting routines to work better with triaxial ellipsoids in this type of polar view.

CIRS should have the real PRIZE data from this flyby ....

mapping of the S Polar region while Enceladus was in eclipse ( no sunlight
to compete with the heat from the vents... )

Should be really interesting ..... but it's going to take them awhile
to get the reconstructed pointing info ....

T

This flyby produced a real gem of science by "imaging" the vents with the CIRS when the room lights were off (eclipse). And the south polar region being illuminated by faint "saturn light" gives a secondary verification of the topography of the vents imaged.

I'd call the flyby planning brilliant.

--Bill

Thank you all for the kind words of the images and the video I posted - and yes, it does bring Fritz Lang and Murnau to my mind too! :)

During the flyby Cassini took about ten color images of Enceladus (10? 11?). I composited nine of them using the raw images. Some of the following images I already posted earlier, these are new a little bit better versions done with some more care, I even bothered to erase most of the cosmic rays.
In all images filters IR3, GRN, UV3, CL -> RGB+luminance

Approach.
Dist.612000km, raw images:N00103726-29 Dist.316000km, raw images:N00103730-33

Dist.307000km, raw images:N00103734-37 Dist.225000km, raw images:N00103738-41

North pole.
Dist.91000km, raw images:N00103752-55 Upper and lower parts B&W. Dist.65000km, raw images:N00103763-66

Outbound. In these images reflected lights give a different tint on each side of the moon.
BTW: there's a bright blue-green spot near south pole. What is it? A mountain?
Dist.131000km, raw images:N00103775-78 Dist.144000km, raw images:N00103779-82

Dist.213000km, raw images:N00103793-96

I agree wholeheartedly - talk about maximising opportunities!
Many plaudits to those involved in the flyby design.

Here is the complete Voyager view (Emily's post contained one frame of a mosaic).

Ted

Click to view attachment

All... NASA To Release New Details from Close Flyby of Saturn Moon

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=25007

Wednesday the 26th press conference at 2:00pm EDT. On NASA TV http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Craig

Did anyone catch the The von Kármán Series Lecture webcast last night? Did Dr. Hendrix give hints of what will be in the press conference?
-Floyd

Here's a first cut with some Rev 61 images now in the map (both northern and southern hemisphere).

Click to view attachment

The full resolution version is here:

http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html#ENCELADUS

Enjoy,

Steve

Thank you Steve - still the Web's best source for mapping information of this kind.

News release of the Enceladus flyby. The plume is slightly warmer than expected and has organics!

Whoo-hoo!

Anyone have the list of the organics detected and the relative amounts?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-rele....cfm?newsID=827

-Mike

[EDIT: This would be the most expensive sparkling water ever tasted - and worth every penny!]

Anyone else here for the media briefing? Bring popcorn?

I hate to break it to you, Stu, but it's already over

Ah, got my times mixed up. Never mind. I'll look forward to reading up the results.

The Tiger Stripes were found to be hot along most of their entire length. ("Hot" meaning ca. 100 K above the surface temperature)

NASA image release: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10361


And Chris McKay weighs in on the possibility of life on Enceladus: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features/feature20080326.cfm
(Spoiler alert: might coulda happened)

-Mike

I saw about five minutes of what must have been a very short news conference. No audience questions. The only thing I remember was that all particles were very small which will allow the next Cassini pass through the plume to be at a lower altitude.

Jack

Yeah - one hour less time difference between the US and Europe for a few weeks, until we're on summer time too.

Anyone know if the conference will be posted online? I missed most of it - didn't realize there was a separate media channel until it was too late ;can't see any repeats listed.

I hate that whole media channel thing. Stupid NASA. I missed most of the press conference myself, but fortunately I was able to catch up with John Spencer and Hunter Waite by phone, so I've got good stuff for an article later today -- stay tuned. Carolina Martinez told me that she was working on getting the press conference (maybe audio only, I am not sure) posted on the Enceladus flyby blog later today for the benefit of everyone who missed it. So check there and post here when it shows up!

I think the biggest news is that, compositionally, Enceladus looks like a comet, which is totally, completely baffling.

--Emily

CICLOPS article on Enceladus' plume: http://ciclops.org

Composition of plumes compared to comets: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10357


And the INMS spectrum showing simple and "complex" organics (their definition of "complex" is very different than mine - we're not talking teterodotoxin here): http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10356


(Dalton = amu; benzene is about m.w. 78)

From CICLOPS cpcomments:
"Also, it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar
fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane --
acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc."

-Mike

As sparkling water goes, I am not sure I'd like the taste of this....

Ciclops' unsurprising gushing (!) notwithstanding, there are a few people
(e.g. Veronique Vuitton at the Titan Chemistry workshop here in Miami
http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/Bil301/Titan2007.html )
noting that some attention should be paid to possible chemistry on the
surfaces of the INMS instrument itself (e.g. during Titan flybys, benzene or
Phenyl (C6H5), cant remember which, peaks AFTER closest approach). In
other words could these 'Enceladus' organics be reaction products of
Enceladus water with Titan gunk on the inside of the instrument?

I personally doubt it, but wanted to note that 'unambiguous' is a
pretty heavy duty word for what may be a rather complex situation.

I guess I won't complain too much if a Titan Flagship does a little bit
of Enceladus science on the way, though. Looks not entirely uninteresting....

Panspermia in action. "Attack of the Saturn Beasties" sure to follow.

"Hey, you got your smog in my geyser."

Or: "Who Plugged the Probe?"

Missed the NTV briefing.

Looking at the following graph with mystery vertical axes:
MassSpec graph at PhotoJournal

I'm wondering if there's some nitrogen hiding in there. The lack of a large NO2 peak could be diagnostic of it's overall absence, but theres plenty of curve under which N2 and NO could be hiding, as well as some in the "simple" and "complex" organics.
Also, NH3 and fragments thereof at 17 AMU.

Does anyone know why 1) little nitrogen is inferred from the data or 2) when a published paper with these results will be available?

Can I please caution peeps about the 'comet' comment

Which comet? Compositionally, comets appear to be extremely heterogeneous.

Secondly, observational planetary science should always avoid any labels that carry some kind of genetic connotation (since they're invariably wrong). So, if it barks like a comet, it's a comet?
Oh, metaphor god, strike me down.
For example, you can call a bunch of squiggles a dendritic pattern, but not a channel network (since it implies formation by fluid flow, whereas dendritic is purely descriptive) - unless you're pretty sure it's a channel network.

There are other ways to make heavier organics.

I'm loving these new data - the CIRS stuff is beautiful. I'd like to know how the shear heating bods feel about these results....

Very interesting that the sulci hot spots are very noticeably parallel - why might this be???

"Simple" organics = 1C + heteroatom [N or O] or 2C + associated hydrogens

"Complex" organics = 2C + heteroatom [N or O] or 3C + associated hydrogens

Propane m.w. 44
Ethanol ("moonshine" ) CH3CH2OH m.w. 46

Note that methanethiol (CH3SH) is a whopping 48 amu and was not detected by INMS

(but acetonitrile CH3CN (m.w. 41) , could be a "complex" organics consituent)

-Mike

I'm ashamed in the presence of you chemists.

space.com article on Enceladus is out: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0803...yby-update.html

-Mike

For those who missed the press briefing:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini20080326.cfm

Emily's article regarding today's briefing on Enceladus: http://planetary.org/news/2008/0326_Cassin...tes_Like_a.html

Nicely written, Emily!

-Mike

You got that right, Mike. Superb work, Emily, written in such a way that even a humble artificial intelligence such as myself can understand it all!

The cometary compositional similarity is interesting. Almost begs the question of whether something unexpected (heating) happened to them rather then something funny about Enceladus. I can't see any possibility of Enceladus being a captured body.

I would dearly love to see some 10m resolution (or better!) NAC photos of the hottest areas of those tiger stripes, along with the WAC context shots. I know they plan some high resolution views in the next flyby, but I haven't yet read just how high the resolution will be. Hope their plans for the next flyby work. The 15 year night cometh soon.

Can one of you astrobiololgy or icy body chemical types comment? I read the headlines noting the discovery of "complex organics," but the published spectrograph displays the heaviest broad peak centering around 40 Daltons. I wouldn't normally describe molecules of this weight range as "complex."

Are molecules heavier than the C2/CN/CO range typically considered complex by space scientists?

I noted that Emily's blog entry stated that "At higher masses, not shown on the graph above, "we saw more complex compounds, like propyne, propane, maybe even acetonitrile, and then we saw things even more complex. But they were so weak in signal that we didn't venture an identification." Propane and propyne should have appeared on that graph, since its X-axis goes up to 50 Daltons. Was that data simply erased from the publically released spectrograph?

Yeah, is what we're seeing between comets and Enceladus anything but ices + one-time heating to drive a little chemistry? It doesn't look to me any more remarkable than the fact that SiO2 exists in the rocks of Earth, Moon, and Mars or that N2 exists in the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars. You put the same elements together, and you usually get the same compounds.

Exactly - thankyou.

My view is that the 'comet' label - whether it was meant to or not - connotes some suggestion that the organics are primordial. However, the heat flux and plume activity strongly suggest active chemical synthesis (a la Matson), which (to my feeble mind) is more astrobiologically interesting.

My thoughts exactly. I strongly suspect that the emission areas are very localized, extremely narrow, and MUCH warmer than their immediate surroundings, which are presumably experiencing secondary heating... the actual vents have temps certainly exceeding 273 deg K.