Found a few more to make this b&w composite, but no ridge or border between the high and low contrast regions seen here. I would guess that the closer and full disc images would be coming in the next transmission which I read is probably in a few hours from now.

Images are starting to appear on the Cassini raw files site. Click the above image to get the giant color hi-res composite by Emily Lackdawalla from The Planetary Society website. The famous walnut ridge is clearly visible in better detail than we have seen previously. Also visible is a clear boundary between the famous Iapetus white and dark sides beginning to appear on the right.

The very first time we humans ever had a look at the surface of another world was in 1966 with the Luna 9 spacecraft. The event is nearly wiped from our collective memory after the successes of Apollo, but at the time this was another feather in the cap of the Soviet Space Program. Now they were able to claim the first successful touchdown as well as first man in space, first spacewalk, first object in space… you name it.

The Lunokhod 2 rover lasted much longer and traveled much further than Lunokhod 1 did. It covered a distance of 37 km and operated for 4 months.

More than a year after Americans set foot on the moon in 1969, the Soviets landed the worlds first remote “rover” type vehicle ever to explore the surface of another world. One almost has to wonder how the politics of this mission even played out to bother even letting it continue. It would hardly seem worthwhile sending a robot to do the work actual humans would be conducting 5 more additional times beyond the historic Apollo 11 landing from the year previous.

The rover was named “Lunokhod” and translated means, “Moon Walker”, it carried out a mission for 11 days and traveled 10.5 km. Despite the fact that nobody knows exactly where the rover rests today, the rover and lander were sold at auction in 1993 for $68,500. The auction catalog read that it was, “resting on the surface of the moon”.

The Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 was the third such craft to be successfully sent to the moon in history. The images were not very great, as can be seen… but it was the first glimpse mankind ever had of the side of the moon that is permanently facing away from us. With the first look at the “dark side of the moon” many people were quite excited and the images were published the world over. It took a total of 29 pictures and was able to image at least 70% of that unseen side of the moon.

The image is largely intact but for the purposes of presentation I faked the “8” in the number on the bottom and actually added some noise lines.

While looking at all the strange images from old Soviet moon missions on Don Mitchell’s site, I thought it would be interesting to design a set of wallpapers from these early images. I call the series “Smallsteps” as in Neil Armstrong’s famous, “One small step…” quote from Apollo 11. Obviously, there would have been no “giant leap” without a large number of these other “small steps” preceding the Apollo Program (although some of the images I have planned actually come after or during the Apollo program).

To me, the fact that the human race was even doing space exploration back then seems almost out of time — and then you look at the spacecraft that were sending back these images and it is amazing that anything really ever worked. Tin cans with cameras sending back images that were often just as bizzare and rough as the vessels that carried them. It is even more incredible when you consider that people eventually started strapping themselves to these rockets and floated around the vacuum of space in boxes wrapped with foil.

Seems appropriate enough to start the whole set off with the V2 images of Earth sent back in the shockingly early year of 1948. According the the Air and Space Museum these are the first images of the Earth taken from space in history. The image itself I suspect was just scanned from some print and the number tags and directionals are original (although there were about 17 of them and I removed a majority of them in Photoshop).

On Sept. 10, the Cassini spacecraft performs its closest flyby during the entire mission of the odd moon Iapetus, passing by about 1,640 kilometers. The moon is somewhat further out than most of the others, so despite the fact that Cassini has many months if not years in front of it still, the moon is too out-of-the-way to be making any additional passes. Who knows when another spacecraft will be this close again? Hope its a good look… it will have to last.

I made this “close to true color” image from the raw files using the BLU, IR1 and GRE filters. The distance seen here is approximately 694,000 kilometers.

Just thought this was a pretty view of Mars taken by Hubble. It seems “shiny” like a marble. The orignal was found at this Flickr account.

This is a bit old taken from February 2007’s New Horizons encounter at Jupiter. A very noisy image was released of Io on the dark side of Jupiter that illustrated the glowing lights of lava flows and auroral displays in Io’s tenuous atmosphere interacting with Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Noise always bothers me and there has been a desire to somehow clean up the presentation of this fantastic image.

The process was simply to blur the image, layer highlight information a few times with varying degrees of sharpness or blur and to simply hand remove what would seem to be simply noise artifacts. The problem is that some of this information wasn’t just noise, but is actually auroral glow (especially at the disk edge). So after some of the noise was removed it was softened and re-introduced selectively around active areas where the assumption is that the glow near these spots is more intense. The final step was to simply reduce the file size so that it became sharper.

This presentation is purely artistic although it does come from real image data… I just wouldn’t use it to support any scientific papers. The items marked simply as “volcano” were newly discovered by New Horizons.

Just as with the previous color image of Rhea, the same process was used to create this view of Rhea against Saturn.

This image was added to a set of images posted later as it was taken as part of the same approach as the others.

Cassini actually passed within 5,000 km of Rhea (a moon of Saturn) on the 30th and took a multitude of images. All the closest images are quite bright and it is unclear if the moon is just that bright, if there was an anomaly in the process or if some basic calibration has yet to occur. At any rate here are more distant images from the flyby and what happens if you register the various filtered images into one RGB (red, green, blue) file in Photoshop. The IR1 (infrered) is placed in the red channel, the GRN is placed in the green channel and the VIO (ultraviolet) is placed in the blue and you get what is truly false color, but not very far from what other natural color images have shown in the past.

Saturn (the solid color behind Rhea) seems a bit more green than expected… however, if the moon was starting to pass onto the side of the planet in darkness, it does tend to move toward green hues when in shadow.

Here is another one the further away images at 58,731 km in clear filter (B&W). You can see into one of the craters along the edge at the lower left side and peer across at the opposite side wall. It is similar to the close flyby images obtained of Dione and its deep canyon walls from last year.

And another clear filter from 61,602 km:

So, the bottomless pit on Mars is not bottomless (although still a hefty 78 meters deep)

And the Martian rovers survive the dark dust storm of 2007 and resume their extended missions. The only question remaining is… what exactly (if anything) can destroy these everlasting robots! Below is a recently returned image of the Martian surface as it appears today.