You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Mariner 10 Image Made New

Mariner 10 Image in Color

According to Ted Stryk (a regularly featured imager) this image has been under construction for over a year (higher resolution available here). If you are unaware, to date… no color images have seen the light of day from the 1973 Mariner 10 encounter. So it is with unexpected shock that we are granted this fine image from an old encounter the night before we are expected to be dazzled with a plethora of new Messenger images.

Although different missions are handled differently than others, we may not be granted all images as soon as they are received here on Earth. For example, Cassini has its images open almost immediately through the raw files link… while ESA makes us wait (and still does) while they release “official” images and other reports to the press. The Cassini method is far greater an option as freelance imagers will get color composites up and available hours after an encounter while you may wait weeks for the official imaging team to get around to making color composites for public consumption. I fear the latter will be true of Messenger (especially as Mercury is not expected to be an overly colorful place), but most US based planetary missions have been great about sharing the wealth practically in real time… hopefully Messenger follows the trend.

So enjoy this for now — as stated by JRehling at unmannedspaceflight, “The best Mercury image in mankind’s history — for another week.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Mercury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

14 Responses to “Mariner 10 Image Made New”

  1. Gordan Says:
    January 13th, 2008 at 9:07 am

    For the record, New Horizons also featured a raw image page (the pages are probably still there) as soon as the images were being downloaded. The fact the data playback was delayed until after the encounter doesn’t diminish the fact the guys went ahead and provided us with the raw (actually, they were partly calibrated!) imagery almost as soon as they received it. Saying New Horizons made us wait is unfair to the guys behind the mission.

  2. Gordan Says:
    January 13th, 2008 at 9:12 am

    See here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/

  3. thomas Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 1:00 am

    It seemed to take weeks for all the Jupiter images to appear on those pages… was that due to calibrating? I just recall a really slow trickle of images from the encounter over what seemed to be weeks. Do I recall that incorrectly?

  4. Gordan Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 2:49 am

    The images started to get down only sometime in March IIRC, after the whole closest approach thing was over. It wasn’t a case of them dragging out the releases. I remember clearly, John Spencer was hanging out at UMSF and we were all playing with images of Io’s volcanoes as they came down, before they even released the press release about the volcanoes. This was when the selected first few images were downlinked before the flyby was over, but as additional data came down they regularly posted it. It’s all there in that page I linked to.

    I think Alan Stern is very much aware of the power of outreach and they all agreed sharing the images with the public in near real time was the thing to do. As I said, they even went ahead and uploaded partially calibrated images for us - Cassini dumps just pure raw stuff.

  5. thomas Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am

    well color me stupid… i could swear i checked for new images on that site for well over a month and new items would appear long after the flyby. so, who doesn’t release images as the cassini team does… anything ESA right? :)

  6. Gordan Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    Well, mostly ESA, yes. :D Though, they did release Huygens images the same day they were downloaded so…

    ESA-only missions (MEX, VEX, Rosetta to some degree) tend to not release anything.

  7. Ted Stryk Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    It is important to remember that it was a few weeks after the flyby before NH began transmitting the bulk of its images, due to the fact that it had to turn its instruments away from Jupiter to do this. Also, note that it took weeks and maybe months (my memory fails me) to send all the data back. The New Horizons team didn’t use the limited mass and power on their spacecraft to build a high speed transmission system, but instead gave it high capacity solid state recorders. Since there won’t be much action for a long time between Pluto and any KBO encounters, it has plenty of time to slowly transmit data back. However, the they of course can’t release images that have yet to be transmitted.

  8. thomas Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 10:16 am

    that must have been it then… i wasn’t aware they needed that much time for transmission. although (now that i think of it) i do recall some delay due to NH traveling down through Jupiter’s magnetospheric “tail” as it was busy doing science.

  9. thomas Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 10:17 am

    you two are awesome science advisers!

  10. mike Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    Im doing a project for school i was wondering how long it took to build the mariner 10 and also how long it took for the probe to reach Mercury

  11. thomas Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

    The Mariner missions were a series of spacecraft that were sent to Mercury, Venus and Mars. Not sure if you will find a clear answer to that… my guess would be from the date of project approval to a few months before launch. many of these missions shared hardware… for instance, Cassini was made possible from investments made to build the Galileo craft.

    it was launched November 3, 1973 and arrived March 29, 1974.

  12. mike Says:
    May 7th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

    Thomas thank you appreciate it

  13. mike Says:
    May 10th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    Thomas i just had a question and i know you said it would be hard to find but do you know how long it took for NASA to build the Mariner 10?

  14. thomas Says:
    May 10th, 2008 at 5:20 pm

    • Mission was approved by NASA in 1969.

    • A Science Steering Group was officially formed in September 1969.

    • January 1970, a Mariner Venus/Mercury project office was established at JPL.

    • Experiments were selected by July 1970.

    • July 1971 a contract was negotiated with the Boeing Company, Kent, Washington, for design and fabrication of two spacecraft.

    • Finally, the mission plan called for launching the spacecraft between October 16 and November 21, 1973.

    But remember the shared technology was devoloped for more than a decade with the evolution of Mariner spacecraft. 10 was the sixth of a series that began with Mariner Venus in 1962 and included Mariner Mars 1964, Mariner Venus 1967, Mariner Mars 1969 and Mariner Mars Orbiter 1971.

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