I have assembled a montage of processed Nozomi images. Keep in mind that I really shrunk it for the sake of our dialup users, so click on the link if you want to see it at full resolution. While the mission did not succeed, it did return some really nice shots along the way. The one, distant Mars shot is the tiny crescent in the lower right.



http://www.strykfoto.org/nozomim.jpg

Beautiful, Ted; thank you!

Sigh...pity, really. That imager was great, would have done quite a job at Mars. However, JAXA's rapidly ascending the learning curve. Got the feeling that their missions in the next decade are gonna result in some serious bruising of our collective lower jaw as it hits the floor...

Nozomi was a good little spacecraft. Its real problem is that it didn't get quite enough velocity during one of its earth flybys due to a valve malfunction. The fact that it came anywhere near accomplishing its mission after this (and had a good chance, were it not for that d*mn solar flare that damaged it) is a testament to the Nozomi team. Had the valve malfunction not happened, even if it had been shut down by the solar flare, that would have been after the primary mission was over.

MIC was a limited instrument with very limited memory - 1 MB, I think. Many of the images showed extreme evidence of onboard JPEGing, something I tried to suppress. While it would only have returned a few images per orbit, it would have gotten some great Phobos and Deimos gap fill, and, with its looping orbit, would have had a great opportunity to capture some Kodak Moments (Fujifilm Moments?).

I was really rooting for Nozomi, and the fact that it made it so far to only be dealt that blow from a random flare must have been very difficult for those talented engineers who worked so hard to keep her alive against the odds. Their dedication and resourcefulness is why I still hold hope for Hayabusa...

I hope this is not taken as disrespectful, but somehow I can't help but be reminded of this bit from Holy Grail about building the castles in the swamp. Good science learns just as much from "failure" as success. I raise a Lipovitan in toast to efforts!

Echo thanks to Ted for assembling this montage.

Nozomi was an important gap-filling mission and it's failure remains a damn shame. After Mariner 4 did a preliminary probe of the martian field and particle environment, later Mariners and Vikings did NOTHING to explore the martian planetary environment except for ionosphere/upper atmosphere studies with radio occultation and UV spectrometry.

Early Soviet orbiters did some, but their limited lifespan, low data rates and mostly rudimentary instrumentation only sketched a rough idea of the planetary field and particles environment. The one partially successful Phobos mission did provide much real information on the near planet environment, but from a very limited set of orbital geometries.

Global Surveyor's magnetometer provided the first systematic look at the near planet environment, but with only one instrument. Mars Express is flying the first decent investigation of the Martian planetary environment so far.

Nozomi would have provided a lot of information comparable to that provided at Venus by Pioneer Venus Orbiter, together with a small set of perhaps less scientifically important but still valuable Kodak Moment images that we really have not gotten from Mars except through "faking it" from global and regional mapping coverage. And the extreme high phase angle images looking for dust rings might have been dramatically successful.

Actually, MGS had two magnetospheric instruments: the magnetometer and the electron reflectormeter

Mars Express has an Ion analyzer, an electron spectrometer and energetic neutral particle detectors, but no magnetometer. The lack of magnetometer is a big drawback for such studies, but in any case MEX magnetospheric studies are succesful up to now with lots of new and interesting results.

The measurements by Mars Express were expected to be supported by those of the more complete particles & fields instrumentation of Nozomi. But since Nozomi failed, magnetic field approximations for the interplanetary magnetic field were done using MGS data + information from models of the crustal magnetic fields.

"...MGS had two magnetospheric instruments: the magnetometer and the electron reflectormeter"

I shouldn't have forgotten the reflectometer. The failure to include magnetometry on missions with magnetosphere/plasma science (Mars Express, New Horizons, Dawn <that one was deleted in a mission descoping>) is sort of like eating a $100+ gourmet dinner with a allergy plugged nose so bad you can't taste anything!

I have heard rumors that Japan may try this type of mission again. I sure hope so.

I also have an improved version of the Moscovience bullseye image. The raws are heavily jpeged, but the perspective is just plain cool.

Where on earth (pun not intended) do you find this stuff Brilliant images!

Doug

I am working from the raw or near raw data, depending on the image. In the case of the bullseye shot, it is from raw data. Unfortunately, I don't have permission to release the the raw data on the web.

Brilliant! I am perfectly happy to get to see the finished images and let you do all the work.

Central farside images with wide coverage and low phase angles are rare. A lot of the Lunar Orbiter mission regional farside coverage was of moderately fat crescent views. Some are very cool, but not exactly the finest cartographic source material.

I found this 3-view drawing of the Nozomi (Planet- Mars orbiter on an ISAS website. Does anyone have a higher resolution scan of this drawing or perhaps something better?

Rob

Click to view attachment

Any forum member based in Japan has ever heard of this book on Nozomi?
http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4...bookfinder4u-22

In a moment of "compulsive shopping" I bought a copy from amazon.jp
It looks like a really nice booklet, 436 pages entirely dedicated to the history of Nozomi, with very few figures. Too bad I can't read Japanese!
Now, if there was a Japanese forum member that could help me translating just the caption of a couple of images...

Try Google Translation Japanese to English

Then I would need a Japanese OCR or being able to write in Japanese with my keyboard...

Paolo, can you scan and upload these images here, I'll give it a try