One of the most fascinating places in the Solar System to study would have to be the Jupiter moon Io. Previous to Voyager, the only image of Io available would be this image (at left) taken by the Pioneer 11 mission in 1974 which only hinted at what was to come with its slightly orange hue. Beyond this most scientists thought that Io would be another highly cratered and dusty moon very much like our own until Voyager returned its first highly detailed images. You can only image the shock of mission specialists when they got a look at this yellow, red and white pizza moon which was completely void of any sign of cratering.

As it turned out, Io happens to be the most highly volcanic body in the entire Solar System. Enter the Galileo mission of the 90’s which stuck around for a while staying in orbit around Jupiter and not just driving by. Jason Perry is part of the Cassini Mission imaging team and has been re-processing these Galileo images of Io in his spare time. He has posted a large collection of these images as well as publishing a blog that specializes on all things Io and the images selected here are some of Jason’s recently processed favorites.

These two images are natural color images and most likely best represent what the human eye might see out the portal window of their spacecraft. When asked what he might like to say about these images to a general audience Jason responded, “The colors you see in these two images are largely the result of sulfur and related compounds. Sulfur on Io produced the general yellowish color of much of the surface. The reddish color of the polar regions is the result of radiation-damaged* sulfur. The whitish areas on the surface are the result of Sulfur dioxide: an industrial pollutant on Earth, a frost on Io.” Good information to mention about a highly volcanic moon as many people probably assume that all that red and yellow is similar to the molten rock images you see from here on Earth.

* Jupiter’s magnetosphere traps the solar wind which produces a large amount of radiation. Io orbits within a region that is highly saturated by this radiation.

Just a note that the “atmospheric” looking haze there is surely a camera artifact, but that is part of all the fun in these early space shot images. I dig the noise and the rough nature of these images.

In August 1966 NASA began the Lunar Orbiter series of missions that were intended to get up-close images of smooth areas of the moon suitable for landing both Surveyor unmanned lander probes as well as the eventual manned missions of Apollo. Note that these missions had only begun 3 short years before the successful Apollo 11 mission that saw mankind take its first steps onto the surface of another world… now that is some turn-around time! Lunar Orbiter 1 actually took place while the Surveyor series of missions had already begun. This would suggest that some of the data obtained from the Lunar Orbiter probes were collected and used immediately in the execution of Surveyor missions.

This first Lunar Orbiter mission is credited for returning the first 2 images of Earth as seen from the distance of the moon. Most people refer to these kinds of images as “Earthrise” images, although that description is incorrect in the traditional sense of the word. Since the same side of the moon always faces Earth, an Earthrise is only possible in a Lunar orbiting spacecraft that is in effect chasing the Earth. Down on the surface of the moon… if you can see Earth in the sky, then you will always see Earth in the sky. It will always be in the same place, at the same size and at all times of the Lunar day.

A while back wanderingspace posted 2 great animations of the Mariner flybys of Mars. They had a great nickelodeon feel to them and are two of the best posts on this blog (in our opinion). So when Emily Lackdawalla posted recently on the first “earthrise” as seen from a probe in orbit around the moon – she linked to this great database of moon shot mission images from the 60’s. Glimpsing at these collections, it was clear that there existed the same potential for another nickelodeon style animation of a trip to the moon.

The mission shown above is Ranger IX and there are many more potential animations that can be made from other Ranger missions or from the Lunar Orbiter series of images. Maybe one day.

Sorry for the huge file size… about 1M.

Look at the date on this mission. It’s 1966… 3 years before the Apollo 11 manned landing on the moon. It shows you what we as a species could really do had we the initiative to do it. Just 3 years after landing the first unmanned probe on the surface of the moon… we were ready to send people. That would almost be like sending men to Mars just a few years after Viking landed in 1976. Okay… it is much further away than the moon and many other technical difficulties as well. So lets say that it would been like sending people to Mars 10 years after Viking. That would be 1986 and here we are 20 years after that saying it will still take another 15.

The Surveyor craft was sent to the surface of the moon largely just to prove that we could do it. It was doing what its name suggested… surveying places for Apollo to plant a few flags.

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).

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 11 as it approached its historic landing.

Similar… no?

Ted Stryk, over at unmannedspaceflight.com (see “imager portfolios” in the right hand column), performed some handy work on these old Mariner 7 images on its approach to Mars. After the image clean-up work was completed he posted the files for download on the forum and wanderingspace worked the animation so that the trip to Mars would appear smoother. The result is very much as Ted describes as having, “a turn-of-the century nickelodeon look”, which is a pretty cool effect for an actual trip to Mars clip.

Mariner 7 was launched in March of 1969 and arrived in August of that same year. Shortly before arriving a battery exploded on board Mariner 7 and despite this near disaster, the Mariner team managed to get the spacecraft in fine working order just in-time for the encounter. A sister craft, Mariner 6, had flown by Mars only days before 7’s encounter and I intend to take a shot at arranging those frames for animation as well.

Ed White is the first American space walker, which took place on Mercury 7. Sadly, he later died on the ground in the tragic Apollo 1 flash fire which took place during a test run. The accident took the lives of 3 astronauts before Apollo even got off the ground.

Note: I erroneously labeled this wallpaper as Mercury 7 and not Gemini 4. Image has been corrected.

Image Note: Some of the Earth image at the far left has been extended in Photoshop to fill out the space. The original image was square.

Ariel is the third of the five larger moons or Uranus. It is somewhat similar to Saturn’s Rhea in composition, about 30% rock and 70% ices. There are obvious ridges and details that would appear to be somewhat “young” features (which is still quite old to you and me), but there is little known about this moon as it was only viewed once from 127,000 km by Voyager 2.