RPIF? Regional Planetary Image Facility. NASA used to archive all it's planetary data in multiple RPIF's around the US and the rest of the World ( 8 outside the US, 10 in the US) - now they're maintained more than
UCL? University College London...just next to Euston Station.

As soon as I discovered that the UK had an RPIF I got in touch - Peter Grindrod is the guy at UCL. He was great - 'Come on down' - so I did.

I could not believe it. Pictures tell the story best..

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/doug_images/RPIF/

That's a tiny tiny subset of what this place has got. Magellan mosaics by the hundred. Early Viking mosaics..the same. Lunar Orbiter images - thousands of them. Hycon (I think) images, stacked in filing cabinets like toilet-rolls on a supermarket shelf. Opened a cupboard of Viking orbiter images - dozens of rolls of negatives...and there were 4 cupboards full. I took a full 23 CD set of the Galileo SSI data set away with me to be returned whenever I get the chance. I hardly touched the place... journals by the thousand - it's just extraordinary. Peter couldn't have been more helpfull - even gave me an LPSC '07 bag to take the CD's away in... If you like data, if you like being amazed..find out if there's an RPIF near you...and GO.

You might end up with your desk loooking like this

I'm now having a hack at the Earth 2 1 flyby imagery which Emily flagged up as interesting. It's not easy though - bad fringing between filters (they went R, IR, G, IR, V - so there's quite a lot of movement between filters) - and I'm only doing one set every hour of the sequence otherwise I'll be here till Juno launches doing it.

Some of the data, however, lacks..er.. 'integrity'. The Earth 1 flyby data is good. The Earth 2 flyby data is dreadfull. Dropouts for almost all the closest data - slowly getting better towards the end of the imaging sequence. A few 'choice' chunks