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.
« It’s Go Time Cassini!
Enceladus Flyby: A Quick Mosaic »

An Early Look

Enceladus March 12, 2008

Much more to come… here is one that immediately popped out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:27 am and is filed under Enceladus, news. 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.

5 Responses to “An Early Look”

  1. Bill Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 7:41 am

    aren’t those craters in the middle weird? what’s with that?

  2. Gordan Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 9:58 am

    Viscous relaxation is the term. This was seen in Voyager images and indicated the ice on Enceladus was warm at least at one point so it could slowly flow, rather than contain the rigid form of craters seen on the other icy sats.

    P.S. The images you see on the raw pages are pretty much it, not more to come. Imaging was scarce in this pass because spacecraft orientation was optimized for sniffing the plume. The outbound wide angle shots taken in eclipse are pretty much it as far as ISS is concerned.

  3. thomas Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 11:04 am

    whaaaaaaat?… that and the “snffing” instrument failed to send data? so does this mean this event is almost a wash?

  4. Gordan Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 11:55 am

    This flyby was never designed to be a primarily imaging pass. That should have been obvious from the fact Enceladus entered eclipse just a couple of minutes after closest approach. It was always meant to be a fields-and-particles pass with optical instruments just riding along.

    While the Cosmic Dust Analyzer apaprently failed to record data, other instruments were active. Notably INMS which analyses the composition of the particles. The CDA would give us a more accurate assessment of how big any many particles there were in specific parts of the plume. There will be another fields and particles pass devoted to Enceladus this year, the other two will be primarily optical remote sensing passes. That is, photo-ops everyone seems to like best.

  5. thomas Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 2:02 pm

    i do like the photo-ops… but this pass is easily as exciting for data purposes. i think everyone wants to know exactly what that stuff is!

Leave a Reply