Hey folks, Christmas came just a little bit late this year...

http://dawnpub.igpp.ucla.edu

It is a LOT of data. Just the Vesta Approach includes about 2000 FC images! Wow!!!

I think that the first thing I'm going to work on is that approach sequence/movie that I wish I'd had in real time. The rotation of Vesta through the image sequences makes color composition very hard, but I am sure there are people here who are up to it. I hope someone here can come up with a pretty color global shot that I can put into a comparison montage!

I'm so excited about this data that I'm breaking my usual prohibition against posting links to my own blog entries. Dawn approaches Vesta, how I wanted it to happen!

(Sorry if I am talking to my self here. I hope it's only because other folks are asleep or haven't downloaded the data yet.) The one thing I'm still scratching my head about is that it doesn't seem they ever shot a multi-frame mosaic quickly enough to avoid Vesta rotating underneath them, at least not that I've found yet. (I hope someone will tell me I overlooked something.) There seems to be absolutely no way to make a high-resolution global mosaic without reprojecting images to compensate for rotation; and with Vesta being as lumpy as it is, that requires a good shape model and some code. The final set of images taken before the start of the Survey mission is called "mosaic" but it seems to have recorded a full rotation of Vesta with the spacecraft sweeping back and forth along a line of longitude, taking three frames to cover Vesta from north to south, letting it rotate underneath Dawn. It is perfect for a global base map at constant illumination geometry, but I can't get my high-res global view. I want my high-res global view!

Awesome work Emily.

With the images and animation you have posted so far, it kinda proves that we were right to complain make our plea for more images to be released.

I only wish I had some idea of how to process these files. Tutorial references please

Emily, none of us would mind if you did that more often, honestly! I'm sure new members especially would welcome it if you let UMSF know when you'd written something you think people might find interesting. I think we forget sometimes that new people find UMSF, and take up an interest in space exploration, every day, so we shouldn't assume everyone reading UMSF posts already knows the backgrounds of the posters. So if you want to post a link to something you've written, fire away! :_

I'm very happy with that data release, and your animation, Emily, is fantastic!
It's interesting, that Vesta looks in this animation somewhat crisper and better imaginable as real object than in first images (and animations) from approach phase published last year.

"I'm so excited about this data that I'm breaking my usual prohibition against posting links to my own blog entries"
I haven't problem with this as I often do the same thing .

now I see "This site is temporarily under construction"

Emily, nice animation!

Hm. Me too. I haven't received any "cease and desist" style email though. I haven't had any more time to do more image processing today, unfortunately.

So where is this data ? Anyone knows ?

Is it right to say that, if data has been publicly available at least once, it should always be?

I am sorry if this almost falls into the OT category, but I thought it might be worth discussing. If anyone disagrees, feel free to make yourself heard.

I doubt that anyone in this forum would say no.
You are being a bit cryptic. Has the data been removed? If so, for what reason?
A different question:
Would releasing data for a period of time and then removing it fulfil the mission's obligations for data release? I would guess no one here would say yes.

The original link went into the data page, now it goes to the site's home page. It's most likely that it really is just 'under construction', still being developed, and that the proper link will be up and running soon.

Phil

Just noticed this at the PDS Small Bodies Node:

http://pds-smallbodies.astro.umd.edu/data_...ase_sched.shtml

Some interesting things coming up... including the Dawn dates and Rosetta Lander Mars flyby data...

Phil

Including, that the Hayabasa imaging and v2 of the LIDAR has finally been released.

Does anyone know, what happened to Dawn's FC raw data? Data release was scheduled for 1.3.2012 (more than one month ago) and PDS is still empty. Some problems with calibrations or something similar?

No, much more complicated. There is a disagreement over certain aspects of the documentation and PDS will not ingest the data until the situation is resolved.

Phil Stooke

Thanks for answering my question!

I talked with several scientists at LPSC about this and while we won't see it at the PDS any time soon, they all told me I should go ahead and play with the data and encourage others to do the same. I have all the released FC data. When I can find time to work with it I'll make chunks of it available. But we're in the middle of a complete site overhaul just now and I don't have time to play

"When I can find time to work with it I'll make chunks of it available."

That would be nice! I have only few images from 11.8.2011.

According to http://pds-smallbodies.astro.umd.edu/data_...ase_sched.shtml, it seems that we still have to wait only few days (Finally !?)

May not be reliable. I don't think the underlying issue has been dealt with yet.

Phil

LAMO data released for Grand

http://sbn.psi.edu/pds/archive/dawn.html

Water on Vesta, that's a surprise.

Science daily

And Nasa including one flash video file and the pitted terrain on the bottom of Marcia crater.

I don't find it surprising. There's water ice almost everywhere except on exposed planetary surfaces. Plenty on Mars, over a wide range of latitudes. The next large objects are the Jovian moons. Only one is non-icy: the rest are mainly ice.

I think all the big asteroids will have a lot of ice, though mostly sub-surface. Apart from ice incorporated when they formed they may also have ice originating from later comet impacts. Visible ice may indicate nothing more than recent exposure.

the original papers in Science Express:
Elemental Mapping by Dawn Reveals Exogenic H in Vesta's Regolith
Pitted Terrain on Vesta and Implications for the Presence of Volatiles
and a comment article also in Science Express
A Golden Spike for Planetary Science

Freely available Supplementary Materials from the 'Pitted Terrain' paper include lots of great images: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/20...1/Denevi.SM.pdf

still more papers on Dawn at Vesta in today's Nature (sorry, I don't know whether this is the good topic):
Distinctive space weathering on Vesta from regolith mixing processes
Dark material on Vesta from the infall of carbonaceous volatile-rich material

And now for something completely different - Dawn data in the PDS!

Few experiments from images FC21A0003204_11205081617F7K, FC21A0003199_11205081516F2K and FC21A0003205_11205081627F8K (all 24.7.2011)

First image is with "normal" colors (I don't know how close is this to true colors, but its from filters closest to RGB standard).
Second image is with saturated colors.
All images are rotated 180° to the right, so Rheasilvia is on top.

It's fantastic news Finally we have it !
Thanks Machi i love you image with exaggerated colors.

Here's a page I built to browse the Vesta approach data. It's a heavy download; I should probably split it into smaller pages but for now it's easier to keep in one big page. I figured some of you might find this useful.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/daw...n_approach.html

Too tired to do anything very insightful with the data, but here's an animation of a limb survey toward the end of the Survey Orbit phase.

Oh for a little bit of panning about...sometimes I hate reaction wheels

I have not yet seen a *single* color global mosaic. As far as I know, the only way to get a higher-resolution color global view than the 100-ish-pixel ones from way early in the approach phase is to do it the hard way: build a shape model, create global color and albedo maps, reproject things back out to a simulated view. It's making me absolutely crazy.

Thanks!


It's not the only way, nevertheless it's difficult.
BTW, thanks for that huge gallery, it's very useful.

Another glimpse from my planned blog entry - southern mountain in red-infrared view:

I would be very grateful if you could do that one in approximate true color. I want to update my "all asteroids visited by spacecraft" poster and do it in color this time. Fortunately I won't be hampered by there being no color global photos of Vesta because Vesta is so big that if I tried to put the whole thing on it, you wouldn't see most of the others. So I'm only planning to have it peek over the edge.

I haven't that one in "true" colors, but I have this one (which is similar) in filters 7, 2, 8 (centered at 653, 555 and 438 nm).
Based on spectra, Vesta is red object, so this is probably close enough to true colors.

Thank you! And here is another index page, to the Survey phase data. And I have now split the Approach and Survey pages into sub-pages to avoid bringing Firefox to its knees.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/daw...awn_survey.html

Yes, that's the way to go I think. And that's exactly what I'll probably do unless a shape model gets released within a not too long time (not likely to happen I think).

Your blog post today discussing this problem mentions that the Vesta imaging team is working on a detailed 3d model “of this lumpy bumpy world” that is not likely to be released publicly soon. It’s also my understanding from past posts that Vesta's topography is being mapped for the possibly separate purpose of “mapping,” not just the surface, but the density and distribution of Vesta’s entire mass, and combining this information with delicate Radio and Doppler effect measurements, all with the goal of “obtaining a subterranean” 3D map of the dwarf planet’s interior and also an accurate 3D map of the gravity environment around the planet, for navigation and other purposes.

Is this a unitary 3D mapping project? Or is their little overlap between the work needed to create a 3D model needed for the visual "planetary taxidermy" described in your current post, and the work needed for subterranean visualization and the mapping of the gravity field.

And now I suddenly remember that already more than a year ago (!) Tayfun Öner was creating preliminary but remarkably good 3D/shape models of Vesta:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=176794
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=177432

You might want to take a look at this regarding shape files..

http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/DAWN/kernels/dsk/

This shape is from Dr Robert Gaskell produced after the survey orbit.
As i remember, this shape use the old system coordinate before the first change (Claudia as prime meridian) by Dawn Team.
I made (year ago) a conversion for cmod file (I choose cmod because i think it is very easy 3d file structures to read) here:
http://patzawa.perso.sfr.fr/Download/Astro...que/Mesh/Vesta/

But even with shape i have a problem to build small mosaic Vesta rotates very fast and condition of illumination change as well.

My quick attempt of projection to the shape model.
View of Rheasilvia with FC21A0003510_11207035045F1F and FC21A0003511_11207035630F1F:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59CyNAuSD8c

I think you're quite close. Here's what I get for the "true" colors of Steins, Lutetia, and Vesta.

Click to view attachment

Thank you for that image! That will be useful for my next project.

Just remember they're not to scale in Stefan's pic, machi.

I think that albedo is in scale.

The colors are fine, I know. I just mean the sizes in the picture are not correct; Emily made a montage that shows them right.

You are very welcome! A few words on the image. I made it because I was curious how these asteroids would appear to the eye. I tried to display them at their correct relative brightness, as you guessed correctly. We all know that there are many ways to approach "true color". This is my version; now that the data are public, anyone is free to make her or his own.