Contained within Justinvg’s excellent poster set on flickr are these gorgeous posters celebrating early Soviet triumphs in space. There are 5 total; Sputnik, Sputnik 2, The Luna Program, Vostock and Voskhod. But if you are a fan of Star Wars — don’t miss his fictional travel poster series (which are also included in the same set as these Soviet ones).

Eric Zelinski had an unusual inspiration to redesign 4 chapters of a classic educational book; Time Life Science Library’s Man and Space. The edition was first printed in 1964 and contained some very basic info-graphics on various space travel themes of the era. Keep in mind that this is pre-Apollo — so some of the items were conceptually unproven, but based upon generally accepted models of that time.

Seen above is “Ways to Go” which presents 3 different ways that NASA was actually considering for getting a man to the surface of the moon and back. Judging from the upstanding rockets seen in diagram #1 and #2, I think #3 is closer to the method that prevailed.

A diagram of the way back home.

A bit of more general information on the local environment around earth.

See also Eric’s submissions to the t-shirt giant Threadless. Many are space themed and his current submission is “Us Divided” which features a cosmic Earth split in two. It is now available for voting, so why not show some support?

The site good.is has this great section called “Transparency” where they illustrate complex and hard to understand topics. Check out this magnificent chart of all the probes that NASA has sent past Earth orbit.

This is so nice, but I am furious that I didn’t get to design this. This is Information design at it’s best naturally by National Geographic. You can see 50 years of robotic planetary exploration at a glance. It even includes failed missions represented by darker desaturated lines. As far as I can tell the cream colored lines are US and the red ones are Soviet. Interesting to see how many of those lines go dark around Mars.

Now where does one purchase such a thing? Perhaps this month’s issue of NG? Here is the link to it on their site complete with zoom viewer and them some kind samaritan posted a hires version to flickr.

Ted loves to re-work old data sets from older missions with today’s technology. Often the results are visually beautiful and put a new face on old encounters, but occasionally this work also finds new items not seen the first time around. Above is a set of images of Neptune compiled to reveal that Voyager managed to capture the transit of one of its very small moons, Despina, across its face. This was a detail not previously seen until the data was re-worked by Ted.

He is back at updating his blog planetimages.blogspot.com and there are more images to come as some of the posts provide some great opportunities to update our “portrait” series of images. These are images that are tagged as such which feature the best global images of each major body in our Solar System.

This image was taken by LRO of the Apollo 12 landing site. Since Apollo 11 already achieved the objective of landing a man on the surface of the moon and returning him safely to home, one of the main objectives of Apollo 12 was to show landing precision. They did this by selecting the resting place of Surveyor 3 as the area they would like to touch-down and did so impressively by touching down only 200 feet away from the robotic lander. You can therefore see the Intrepid Lander, Surveyor 3, the LDEP experiment as well as a good amount of foot traffic left behind by astronaut feet.

Be sure to click on the image for the full size to see all the detail.

Been meaning to catch up on a few odds and ends lying around. This image of Venus was re-worked from Mariner 10 images by Mattias Malmer somewhere around 2005. It is an attempt at showing Venus in natural light and is far better than the version previously used as our “portrait” image for Venus. The issue is that Mariner 10 images only allow one to do that by taking some liberties with UV data. According to Malmer, “I think that if I were to make an even blander version of the this image it would be close enough to reality”.

See the original 2005 post on unmannedspaceflight.com where you can get this image at 4000×4000 resolution. Time for a wallpaper update.

You can also follow the mission in real-time as history played out 40 years ago on twitter. Follow Mission Control, The Spacecraft or The Lunur Excursion Module (Eagle). The Eagle will not have much to say, obviously, until it is actually descending toward the surface of the moon on Monday, but it has just started making some noise on Sunday night.

Follow the Apollo 11 mission in real time at wechosethemoon.org for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. The site comes complete with a gorgeous mission animation that shows the viewer what stage the mission is in as the data loads in the background. Once the page opens up we are treated to various interactive modules like photo and video galleries featuring material from the current stage of the mission as well as an oddly placed JFK and Apollo gallery.

The best part is the real-time audio stream. As I am writing this, the astronauts are asleep and every 15 minutes mission control interrupts the static to essentially report how long they have been asleep and that the mission is progressing nominally. As boring as that is… it sure makes it real and takes those too young to have been a part of it as close to knowing how that might have felt to follow this historic event. Of course, the whole thing peaks on the 20th with the real-time streaming of touch down at Tranquility Base.

Also see NASA’s newly restored footage of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong’s magnificent first step.

If happen to come to own one of these bad boys from the late 60’s early 70’s you are going to need this owners manual. The original owners of these models rarely have this on-hand. If you are in the market, beware of any models from the 13 line since that model had a well-known faulty oxygen tank that is likely to scrub any potential trips to the Lunar surface you may have planned. Get it from Haynes online.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been working to restore historic images from the Lunar Orbiter missions which were launched during the years 1966 and 67. These images have been remastered from the original data sets with today’s computing technology resulting in not only reducing the noise, but brought out details that were not possible with the technology available when they were taken. The above image is just a section of the original (seen below) and is also a work-in-progress so you will still notice the striping and other anomalies.

Although, as a graphic designer I have to say the original has it’s charm too. I like the distortion, noise and various odd anomalies of these historic missions so much that it led to my making the Smallsteps series of wallpapers last year. Maybe this new LOIRP image needs to be added to that collection… but I would probably stick with the original for the effect. I love the work they are doing, but I also like that you can see the history in these old crusty images too.

Planetary Blog has a nice review of Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune’s moon Triton. That was 1989 and sadly, there is no way we will be seeing any new Triton images for at least 20 years as no missions are currently approved. There is a concept mission being considered for a New Frontiers class probe which is where we even get the number 20 from, but if that mission is not approved… who knows.

Ted Stryk has been re-working the old Voyager mission images at Triton and the results are shockingly sharp and high resolution. Ted’s work is also used on this “portrait” image of Triton, but this image shown above is another view and is comparatively massive in size for the Voyager Uranus/Neptune encounters.

Its not something we are likely to see again anytime soon, so it is especially nice of Ted to re-image these old voyager images. These are the definitive best shots of each of these bodies, with perhaps the exception of Miranda (second from left, note there is a tiny dark moon which is first). Of the Uranian family, Miranda also happens to be the most interesting (of what know) with its cracks and ridges that somewhat resemble those processes happening on Enceladus and Europa.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, America was playing catch up with the Soviet Union and their multiple successes with the Sputnik series of spacecraft. President Eisenhower feared the Soviets would receive any use of military rockets to deliver spacecraft as a threat to their national security and not as a means to achieve our own scientific goals. For this reason, America’s early attempts to put a satellite in orbit were all failures and eventually placed the US in the embarrassing position of having no success in space vs. the Soviet’s many.

When America finally did resort to using the military class Jupiter rockets to deliver the Explorer series of satellites, the space race had begun and America’s losing streak was over. As Eisenhower feared, the Soviets immediately reacted by protesting Explorer’s “violation” of Soviet borders as the satellite had an orbit that passed over their air space (despite the fact that Sputnik had done the same over the US). To help tamp down any perceptions that the American space program was a militaristic show of aggression, Eisenhower asked NASA to make it’s next launch a different kind of satellite.

On December 18, 1958 the SCORE satellite was placed into orbit and became the world’s first communications satellite by broadcasting the following message:

“This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.”

Happy New Year.

The Planetary Blog today posted an animation of Comet Halley captured by Vega 1 in 1986. The low quality of the Vega images reminded me of how low quality all the mission images to Halley were for their historic encounters. There was one image I found of Halley taken by Giotto that seemed to me to be the best I had ever seen in terms of detail and captured much of the coma that envelopes the nucleus as well. Here is that original image which was found at www.astro.lu.se.

The odd thing about it is the rarity of its use anywhere and the site that provided it gives no other detail about it other than “Nucleus of Comet Halley. Giotto fly-by 1986”. So out of curiosity, I decided to do a google image search for “Comet Halley” and turns out that the wallpaper image created by wanderingspace that features this image comes up first!

In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I would post the original to show how it was beautified. Most of the work was really cleaning up the noise and removing artifacts. Much of that noise was in the form of posterization and happens in the coma. So that noise was largely blurred out since the coma would pretty much just be a large blur of white at any rate, but the rate of gradation was still maintained for some level of legitimacy. Color was added to the image last, but that is entirely artistic. That and the upper left corner of the coma which was extended to fill the frame are the only fictional parts of the image.

All in all… it seems to me that when you remove the artifacts, you pretty much have the final image which was used for the wallpaper image. Less manipulation and more “clean-up” which is what I try to do with all images here when needed.