I didn't do the geometric correction!

The original mosaics were assembled by hand and re-photographed. Two sets were made - at USGS and JPL. At USGS the mosaics were assembled on the insides of hemispherical bowls about 1 m diameter, one of which is still preserved in a display at Flagstaff (Surveyor 7, a sunset view that I have never seen published, with shadows falling across the 'playa' area north of the lander). At JPL they did the same, but separately and possibly (I'm not sure) on larger bowls. The USGS ones were photographed in small sections at high resolution. The JPL ones were photographed using an ingenious geometry that produced rectangular prints - ten of which can be fitted together to make a cylindrical 360 degree panorama. So the geometric correction was done that way, a true physical projection.

I recently scanned the pan sections and I am now painstakingly removing the hideous seams and tonal variations. The results look good for Surveyors 1 and 7 but a bit bland for Surveyors 3 and 5 - I have not done 6 yet, but it will be bland too.

Phil

A number of postings back, somebody was "dissing" the Pioneer Spin-Scan Multi-Polariimiter/Camera as a primitive camera. I'd like to come, a bit, to it's defense.

The camera was actually 3 instruments in one. It was a zodiacal light photometer/polarimiter. On it's way out to Jupiter and beyond, it repeatedly imaged the entire sky except near the sun in red and blue light with full polarization analysis abilities. The resolution was terrible, about 1 or 1 1/2 degrees, but they were mapping the skyglow of the solarsystem, not taking pictures. They proved that the backscattered glow from the zodiacal light disappeared as you went through the asteroid belt to undetectably low levels, and proved that the gegenshein <counterglow--a bright patch in the zodiacal light centered on zero degree phase angle> was a photometric effect, and not due to a dust-cloud orbiting the sun at say the earth's L2 point.

Processing the zodiacal photometry stuff involved mapping the pixels onto the celestial sphere, identifying detectible stars in each field of view, and subtracting the calculated starlight to get sky maps free from bright star contamination. The team doing this work never produces sky-map images from the data, and I've always wanted to see color/polarization maps of the sky from the Pioneers.


The cameras also took intermediate resolution spin-scan polarimetry maps of Jupiter and Saturn with the disks well resolved at a full range of phase angles, not available from earth. Again, the images were 2 color, with full polarization analysys. This provided large amounts of QUANTITATIVE information on light scattering by cloud particles in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, data that was not duplicated or improved on in any way by the Voyagers. This data was and continues to be of use in modeling the structure of the visible parts of these planet's atmospheres.

Finally, the best images from Pioneer 10 had resolution approaching Voyager's best. Pioneer took a picture with 60 km/pixel <if I recall> resolution at closest approach. It''s reproduced in the Journal of Geophysical Research's Pioneer 10 special issue. Radiation hits caused the gain of the camera <basically exposure> to shift a few times during the sequence, and the data has a strong periodic noise component possibly associated with radiation hitting the spinning spacecraft, but it couild and should have been restored and composited into a color image. Voyager's best resolutions on Jupiter were only some 15 to 20 km.

Oh, I wasn't saying they didn't do some amazing things with that instrument. My point was (and remains) that it was not primarily an imaging system, and because of that, it was unable to take anything like the total number of pictures a dedicated imaging system would have, and, indeed, the highest resolution Pioneer images I've ever seen, though they may have similar theoretical resolution to Voyager images, all appeared to retain aberrations and "blurring" factors that made them appear far less clear than the average Voyager image.

I suppose it's possible that I have never seen properly corrected and cleaned-up Pioneer images -- do you have any links for high-quality versions? (Beg, beg...)

-the other Doug

I don't know any links, the Pioneer team never did a very good job of publicising their pictures other than the 3 versions of the NASA SP Pioneer book. They never did any real post processing either, after making final versions of most of the pics. I always though there was a lot more they could have done, starting with putting the raw and final versions of the pics on digital tape at the NSSDC.

I always found most interesting that "boiling porridge" of features in the Pioneer 11 pics of Jupiter's polar regions, something we have never seen since nearly as well.

The Surveyor hemispherical panorama domes (there *must* be a proper name for the things!) were featured in, as I recall, a 1966 or 1967 issue of National Geographic - one of the 'How The US Will Conquer Our Nearest Neghbor' sort of articles which they did quite regularly.

That book is availabe online here. Chapter 7 has a good description of the imaging process, including comparing raw and corrected pics.

Here's a side by side of the best I could find of Pioneer with a "typical" Voyager shot:
(Apologies to those without broadband or who have seen these before. Please let me know if these images are too large or load too slowly and I will edit them to be links only.)

Pioneer 11 :


Voyager 1 and 2:


Pioneer 11 capture the first detail from the polar view:


Pioneer 11 even caught IO!

I made a preliminary page containing several Pioneer 10 and 11 images scanned from Pioneer: First to Jupiter, Saturn and Beyond (NASA SP-446). Back at the time I acquired this book (years ago) I was surprised the images weren't worse, before I had only seen very crude reproductions of the images.

The page is at http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/pioneer/index.html . I will add more images later.

These images are interesting, the belt where the Great Red Spot (GRS) resides was bright at the time of the Pioneer flybys and the GRS's color was far more saturated than it has been ever since. This contrasts with Jupiter's appearance in Voyager, Galileo and Cassini images. Also the Pioneer 11 images of Jupiter's north polar region are still the best images available of the polar regions. It would be very interesting to reprocess the original data using modern computers and software.

It's possible to create some "new" imagens from the Red/Blue raw images avaliable on that book. I've tried and the results improve a little, but we are still working with scanned images...

So we really need to process the digital data.
Perhaps the members of this forum might help in typing those numbers...
Just post the scanned JPG here and we can reply with the typed data.

A few more words about the Surveyor panoramas. The first step was to find prints of the original pans for scanning. I often work at LPI in Houston, so on one trip I looked through the Surveyor stuff. They have all or most of the original frames archived as photo negatives, box after box of them - 80,000 total. But indexing is complex and messy, and besides I didn't have time to work that way. But they had dozens of folders of prints. I searched every folder. A few were mis-labelled, which didn't help. (I added a correct annotation but they are still filed with the incorrect labelling).

Among thousands of prints of individual frames or small mosaics were lots of 'regional-scale' mosaics, but most were compiled only for indexing/coverage plotting purposes and are 'aesthetically challenged' beyond belief. Ray Batson said they were compiled as the pics were coming off the printers to check for gaps in coverage etc., and they could barely keep up.

The useful ones are called "improved mosaics", made for science rather than mission operations. The tonal variations were reduced by processing (in the dark room, mainly) to give better-looking results. The collection includes a lot of mosaic fragments (sectors) with different lighting, but most in local projections which would take a lot of work to fit together. I needed the rectangular versions made at JPL which fit together into cylindrical pans. At LPI I found enough sections to do Surveyor 1, Surveyor 3, and Surveyor 7. These were 8 by 10 inch prints, one print per section, but sharp, and scanned well to give fairly detailed images. Full pans are about 10000 to 15000 pixels wide, each made of ten of these sections. LPI didn't have these for Surveyors 5 and 6. JPL didn't seem to have retained them - maybe in their archives which are a bit tricky to use like this.

Later I went to LPL in Tucson. They had large format prints of Surveyor pans, including Surveyors 3 and 5 which I scanned. They have the best Surveyor 3 material, including excellent prints of the horizon. Finally I spent a week at Flagstaff. USGS in Flagstaff had Surveyor 6 and a set of prints of a Surveyor 7 pan - but not in cylindrical format - which is different from the one I have done, taken near sunset. I'll post some details later. So between these locations I found the full data set that I needed. There is a LOT more to be done with the Surveyors, if anyone feels like a challenge!

Phil

As I understand it, the original television signals were not captured and recorded, the only permanent record of the images are these negatives and any prints made from them, correct?

Let's see -- the Surveyor camera had a low-res 200-line mode and a high-res 600-line mode, if memory serves. It seems to me that what *really* needs to be done is for the negatives (yes, all 80,000+ of them) to be scanned directly, using a scanner that scans each individual line of the television image and generates a "line" of pixels that most closely represents that line of the original television signal.

You could then assemble those lines into digital images that can be both stored far longer and more securely than the negatives and can be manipulated to create highest-possible-quality images and panoramas. (Since you're scanning negatives, you'd just reverse the grayscale somewhere in the process to create positive images.)

In addition, since the mirror position on the camera was probably slightly variable, you might even be able to generate super-resolution images by overlaying images taken of the same scene in the same lighting conditions. At least three of the Surveyors survived long enough to image the same patches of real estate several times at very similar lighting angles over two or three lunar days.

It would not be a cheap process -- it would have to be a government-funded project, I imagine. Maybe it could be sold on the basis of preservation of historical data. But I can well imagine being able to design a scanning system that would accurately scan each TV line and create a high-quality digital version of the image. It would require precise negative positioning control and the width and "targeting" of the scanning beam would have to be custom-designed and precisely controlled, but given ten or fifteen million dollars, a staff of 10 or 15 people, and a couple of years, I bet it could be done quite effectively.

-the other Doug

The Surveyor images were recorded on tape... ANALOG TAPE in some form as a modulated slow-scan video signal. Selected images were later converted to digital format from the source tapes for test purposes and for quantitative analysis of brightness, color and polarization. It must have been gruelingly slow at the time, and the scientific yield was pretty modest. I doubt the analog tapes exist any more but you never know.

Some decade ago, there was a effort underway to get funding to digitize the analog format Lunar Orbiter raw data tapes. As I recall there were one or two known surviving and workable or repairable drives that they said <whoever they were, I don't recall, but it was a team in the planetary sciences community> would read the tapes. I recall some information about the tapes being found in some JPL paint storage etc building, where they'd migrated to from higher quality storage. <I don't recall if this is true or not, now> The effort fell through. NASA wasn't interested. I have no idea if the tapes still survive.

Shouldnt someone like the Planetary Society or similar be looking into saving this stuff?

Perhaps there's scope for a society dedicated simply to the finding, saving, recovering, and storing of this sort of data - not just imagery but any other instrumentation as well? With 300 Gig HDD's being roughly £100 - storage is disgustingly cheap - and now would be the time to recover this stuff for future generations!

For any of this stuff to be lost for good would be a crime beyond description!

Doug

Actually, that project is still underway.
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...erDigitization/

Ted said:

Actually, that project is still underway.
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...erDigitization/

Actually that is being done by scanning negatives, not working off the tapes. I suppose it's possible that a few surviving tape images are included, but certainly most of it is from negatives. It's hard to get back to that way of thinking now, but in the 60s, when computer image processing was in its infancy - batch jobs, not on your desktop - but photo technology was mature (orthophotos, stereo plotters and so on), very few people were really concerned about the electronic version of the data. The electronic version was just an awkward but necessary step along the route to getting the really useful products, the hard copies. And film was the archive medium.

It was the geometric instability of the hard copy, (changing size with changes in humidity, temperature etc) that made the annoying reseaux (patterns of dots and crosses) so common on the older photos. If you knew where the dots were supposed to be you could always rectify the image to take into account any physical distortion or scale change in the medium. Luckily they were dropped after - mmm - Voyager, I guess.

Phil

...And I ought to add something about Russian efforts to do this, too. I'll have to do more later. Suffice it to say they are doing the same - for instance scanning Zond negatives and trying to recover Lunokhod mag tapes. I am in touch with the team doing this. Very slow, no money, part volunteer labor, but eventually it will become a Russian equivalent to a PDS node. But don't hold your breath!

www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1196.pdf

describes some work on this.


Phil

Yeah, Voyager was the last to have the dots. Vidicon cameras and film cameras (such as Lunar Orbiter and Mars 5) were prone to distortion. The next spacecraft with a framing camera, Galileo, used a CCD, which had no need for them. (Gosh that's sad - the 80s were a sad decade for American planetary science)

In the Pionner images of Jupiters moons Ganymede looks like a asteriod with two big craters.

Here is the best I have been able to do with some of the satellite images. While they are all fun to play with, I would love the digital data for the Pioneer Io data, which overlooks the north pole. Perhaps the albedo features could be compared to a Voyager era map.

Io



Europa



Ganymede

Great work! ^

If remember right, one of the Pionners was to take better resolution images of IO.

Somthing happened and they where not taken.

Does anyone know what happened?

Yes, Pioneer 10 was. But Jovian radiation overwhelmed it, causing it to receive false commands, and the image was never taken.

The Pioneer Jupiter missions were done by direct command from earth, the only autonomous capability on the spacecraft was to do a turn by precessing the spin with attitude thrusters, a midcourse maneuver, and a turn back to earth pointing.

The high radiation environment close in to Jupiter caused a number of command errors, such as gain changes in the closest in images, etc. The Io image was mis-pointed and the target was missed. It would have been a fairly decent image, too, not that many kilometers/pixel, maybe 20 or so.

What a shock it would have been if those images made it back.


The art work back than depicted the moons as Cratered frozen rocks.

Another project I am working on is trying to work with the Venera pans. I am hoping to make a few images that have a more "normal" design than the original pans. Here is one I am working on.

The thing that always amazes me about the Venera landers is that apart from a portion of the descent high up in the atmosphere which was under a parachute, they aerobraked all the way to the surface. One figure I've seen said that one of them landed at 7-8 m/s (that's about 15 mph, or 27 kph). It just goes to show quite how thick the atmosphere is on Venus.

Chris

The estimable Don Davis has also rectified Venera data, and created a very nice airbrushed rendition of surface details here:

http://www.donaldedavis.com/2004%20new/VENRDRAW.jpg

Please take note of Don's Copyright statement on the Home Page of his site!

I would love to see him redo his 1970s work with digital data on a computer, rather than the old press-release versions of the images and an airbrush. I think some really neat products could be made. Here is a V-14 pan I have been working on:

I was motivated to work around the inherent limitations of the Venera data, and tried to produce some credible Venus surface imagery based entirely upon Venera imagery, but with cloned fill and various coloring schemes that struck me as realistic.

The order of images is, first row, Veneras 9 and 10; bottom row, Veneras 13 and 14. The Venera 10 image, I have done nothing but reproject and color. The other three, I colored (all four in a different way) and cloned to fill gaps. I probably overdid it with the Venera 9 hills, but got the color best of all there.

If I learned one useful technique here, it was to use the Photoshop magic wand to select a weirdly-shaped portion of the landscape (matching by luminance) and then to adjust its saturation. This may sound like Greek to most of you, but I recommend it to anyone who that makes sense to. I have been meaning to apply it to the cartoon-colored Huygens surface shot, and I think it could do wonders there, because uniform saturation across a shot is a powerful indicator of falsity.

Anyway, I hope at least one of my four tries produces the "feeling" of looking out across a venusian landscape... I like the Venera 9 and Venera 14 shots best -- they almost make me wince in expectation of crushing heat.

WOW!

That is amazing!

Interesting images ! Very nice!
But those hills... are there really hills in the original images? Perhaps just some rock layers on the horizon.
Without geometrically corrected images it's difficult to judge.

I tried everything in my power to correct the Venera images with no results...
I even projectes the images into the inside of a sphere in Celestia and used the mouse to look around. It corrected some distortions, but not all!

It is difficult to distinguish the scales, but there are almost certainly some real hills somewhere in these images, esp. Venera 13. The camera is about 2m high, so no mere bumps in the foreground can appear so far away.

The Magellan data shows some of these landing sites to be in rather rough areas, so hills should be no surprise.



I have tried many things, as well, and eventually got some decent results in more than one way. For the base images in this set, I used the spherical distortion tool in Photoshop, but you have to get the parameters right. I basically placed the original rectangular strip of each Venera image near the top of a much larger square, then applied the spherical distortion tool. This did not remove all distortion (the reasons why are below), but for my chop-and-paste purposes, that hardly mattered.
Originally, I attempted a math-first approach using the engineering specs of the Veneras, but this didn't work because none of the landers rested horizontally, and apparently some of the edges of the images have been cropped away, so the image geometry doesn't match the engineering specs.
A very laborious hand-adjustment of each image is also a way to go, and I attempted that at one point, but even when you're done, you get bowl-shaped images, and that's when I realized that I wanted to re-arrange the imagery [realistically] instead of performing a simple reprojection, and then the demands for accuracy are a bit less when "up" doesn't need to be perfect up.
I should add that my cloning almost always maintains the approximate correct distance-to-horizon of each parcel of image. These really should represent the way a venusian landscape *could* look, even if the particular rocks at these landing sites happen to be arrayed differently.

Sooner or later, we'll get a Venusian "Huygens", but without the data rate constraints and descent+surface imaging will make all of our eyes happy. Until then, manipulation of Venera imagery is all we have.

if the hills are real does this in any way help pin down the landing sites?

Paxdan - no, it does not help locate the landing sites. The scale difference between the area photographed in the pans and the best Magellan radar images is still too large by a very large margin.

Phil

.

Same here. I cannot get the geometry quite right. I try to imitate what looks right, but I have no hard numbers to go on to know exactly how the images were scanned. I do have some quasi-superres images by Don Mitchell that show that the ridges in the distance are definitely real - and they were produced on much better original data than the NSSDC version that he produced from the original transmissions. His work with the Venera pans is by far the best.

I have finally finished the Surveyor 5 pan. Here it is:

Click to view attachment

It is greatly reduced from the original, which is 12000 pixels long. It is also very heavily compressed for postability so artifacts will have crept in. The odd bend in the omnidirectional antenna mast at left is an artifact of the original mosaic production at JPL.

This pan could be extended at the bottom to include the alpha particle instrument, but I don't yet have the time to fiddle with it. Extensive reprojection would be needed. It is a fairly bland scene because of the lighting conditions. Better lit pans were made but I don't have them in this cylindrical format.


Phil

Phil:

Is there anything *interesting* on the horizon of your excellent Surveyor 5 pan?

Bob Shaw

Unfortunately there is no feature on the horizon which can be unambiguously identified in orbital images. The site was never imaged at very high resolution... S5 landed a bit off target. But one distant ridge to the east appears to be a crater rim, and if it is correctly identified it may lead to the exact landing location. It's not clear in this reduced version of the mosaic but eventually the full pan will be released. I think I have a match to this crater and it puts S5 in a location on the south edge of its tracking ellipse. Ewan Whitaker also agrees with the location I am now suggesting.

Phil

Did you create that "happy face" toward the upper right hand corner of the Venera 14 image? Richard Hoagland wants to know.

...but seriously, great work.

http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

Check out Don Mitchell's Venera stuff. It is by far the best I have seen (although I have seen a bit more than is on this site). His work recreating the raw images from the original data is far better than other sources available. Plus, he has lots of neat info on the other Veneras.

Here is a perspective drawing I made in support of the rectified airbrush view referenced earlier. I also made vertical projections and side views including the spacecraft, all plotted by hand. I abandoned the scenery mapping work because the airbrush required constant tweaking while performing at it's fine detail limit. I will redo such work digitally one of these days.

Don

I have created a new Venera page.

http://pages.preferred.com/%7Etedstryk/venerac.html

tedstryk Great work! Your web-page is in my bookmarks as one of my favs.




Also going back to the Pioneer images of the great red spot, they seem too orange compared to the voyager images.

How did Jupiter change so much from 1974 pioneer to 1979 Voyager?

But if you look at Jupiter from 1979 to 2000 very little has changed, at least to me
it has.

Jupiter is highly variable with time. The change in the GRS's color and contrast is real, it had a darker and more saturated color at the time of the Pioneer flybys than a few years later when the Voyagers flew by. Also the belt in which it sits was bright at the time of Pioneer flybys - it is possible that when this happens it becomes more difficult for the GRS to become 'contaminated' with material from surrounding areas.

Nice work!
I does make sense to orient the images that way.
My best atempt in correcting this images is something like this:



It makes sense to look at the Venera image strip as 2 separate images going from a point in the ground in front of the lander up to the horizon. Don Davis diagram of the camera's location really helps in figuring this out!
The the images can be corrected for the odd scan angle and presented in more natural side view perspectives ;-)

Jupiter does change with time, even when seen from Earth!

Look at this images from the 19th century:
http://megasn.obspm.fr/bdip/vitrine.html

The GRS (Great Red Spot) look much more extended and darker than it does today ;-)

Here you can see more Jupiter observations during the last century:
http://www.kk-system.co.jp/Alpo/kk0/Jupiter.htm

Another Surveyor 5 scene. This goes out to the horizon north of the lander.

Click to view attachment

Phil

Thanks for the links!


It really did change! It looked more like Saturn's atmosphere.

The GRS as said looked stretched out.

.

Actually, there are some rectified versions floating around...the problem is that all that remain of those are paper copies, which don't work well for enhancement.

4th rock - excellent job with rectifying the images. Be careful with the alignment - the tips of the pans slightly overlap, but the match isn't perfect due to camera parallax. If you look near where the images touch, you will notice the doublet features. Also, the curvature of the pans is backwards.

Here are some Soviet reprojections: