I know it may seem like the planetary science equivalent of one's thumb blocking the lens, but there appears to be a trend of spacecraft taking pictures of themselves. I guess they can serve some engineering check out purpose, but gosh darn it, I just think they're neat. Rosetta, Beagle leaving MEX, and now Kaguya. Even Phoenix is snapping shots from inside it's shell.

Seeing the hardware in the picture makes me feel that I am a passenger looking out in a way that even panoramas can't. It could have something to do with establishing a human sense of scale, but seeing Haybusa's shadow gave me goosebumps. Maybe I am just so used to seeing things from a cinematic perspective that it feels more "real" that way.

How come this ability seems to be more popular now? Are cameras cheaper? Are mission programmers getting more creative?

I can't recall any early missions with these types of photos - what engineer in his right mind would design a camera to fly to Mars and let the spacecraft get in the way of the view?

Can anyone remember any old school hardware vanity shots? Other than landers, of course, which can't help but get in the picture sometimes? And no humans allowed.

Does Hayabusa's shadow on Itokawa qualify?


Paolo Amoroso

Philae imaging Rosetta, XMM-Newton on board camera, Beagle 2 deployment images, Huygens imaged from Cassini.

Doug

MRO's self portraint using MCS was pretty sweet too even if it was a bit blurry.

There was a very blurry NIMS image of the partially deployed Galileo HGA.

MARDI on MPL took an image of the inside of the heatshield in cruise, but it was too blurry to recognize anything much.

In theory I think the MOC WA on MGS could have imaged the end of the solar array, but this was never tried so far as I know (it would have required the SA to be intentionally moved through the FOV.)

Beagle 2 would have imaged itself using the Wide Angle Mirror - that would have been quite cool.

Doug

Kaguya's pictures of her own antenna and her solar panel were very nice.

Minerva's photos were very good... Too bad it missed the asteroid.

The Surveyors imaged themselves, though the postage stamp mosaics are merely "icky". Their near-sunset shadow pictures are essentially vanity shots and ard damn cool.

I've heard that mentioned before but not seen it anywhere.

Doug

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/history/hires/1966...veyor1_moon.jpg

Full rez, invert it to get the non-raw-image viewpoint <camera is looking up at periscope mirror>

http://epizodsspace.testpilot.ru/e2/snimki/lh2sn.html - Lunokhod 2.

What is this object supposed to be?

Looks like an Alligator snout.

I know it looks like that, but I'd like to know what it is. MER's tracks looked like tank tracks, but they were not tank tracks and that's for sure

O.K. we're talking old timers here

Although this image shows a Lunochod mockup without all the side antennes, it gives a good idea of the scale of the Soviet-Russian lunar rover (remember these vehicles landed in 1970 & 1973 on the Moon):
http://www.raumfahrt-ausstellung.de/downlo...34lunochod2.jpg

Another image shows the ‘tubing’ on the side of the rover, so the photo You’re discussing does probably show one of these rod antennas. Although, to me, the only part alligator-shaped part is the low gain antenna
http://p3.focus.de/img/gen/7/O/HB7OqteQ_Pxgen_r_467xA.jpg

Wow! Any additional information/link/image?



A greyscale calibration chip

The only reference I can find on this is http://www.spacekb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/spac...ntennae-article
I am not sure, but trying to image the antenna, on the spinning portion of the spacecraft with the NIMS, on the fixed, despun portion seems nonsense.
Any idea? Any more reliable reference?

Lunokhod 1 also imaged the Luna 17 lander on which it landed. Although just a grainy TV still, its pretty cool.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/Lk102.jpg

The self portraits of Spirit and Opportunity are very impressive:

Spirit: http://astronomyonline.org/SolarSystem/Ima...elfPortrait.jpg

Opportunity: http://www.hour25online.com/pix/opportunit...april05_02a.jpg

The Viking Mars landers took some dramatic photos with themselves in the picture.

Probably never released, but it was my impression the Voyagers took pictures of their calibrator plates mounted on their radiators.



Deep Impact imaged the results of it's impactor module.

Was there a pic of the Galileo Jupiter atmospheric probe post release ??

For me, the self-portrait thing started with Surveyor 1, and that famous image of the footpad sitting right smack in the center of the field of view, firmly pressed into the lunar surface. Since then, all of the Surveyors and then the Vikings took their first images of their own footpads. So there is a grand old tradition of landing probes imaging themselves before anything else...

-the other Doug

Speaking of vanity and self reference, didn't a Viking ground test camera snap a picture of the imaging team?


Paolo Amoroso

Yes it did, and because of the slow scan process several of the team members can be seen multiple times.

Will LRO be able to photograph the impactor next year?

I KNOW I have this picture somewhere. Bad thing is, I don't remember where. I'll scan it and post it here once I'm done flipping through 10000+ pages of old magazines and newspaper articles from 1991-1995.

Of course we can't forget these, though not technically self-portraits.



Image above: NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft appears twice in the same frame in this image from the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. The camera's successful imaging of Odyssey and of the European Space Agency's Mars Express in April 2005 produced the first pictures of any spacecraft orbiting Mars ever taken by another spacecraft orbiting Mars.



Image left: This picture of the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft by the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor is from the first successful imaging of any spacecraft orbiting Mars by another spacecraft orbiting Mars. The picture is a composite of two views of Mars Express that Mars Orbiter Camera acquired on April 20, 2005, from distances of about 250 and 370 kilometers (155 and 229 miles).

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solars...mgs-images.html

Found the NIMS Galileo self-portrait. It's from a dutch magazine ( Original source Aviation Week apparently ).

Translation from top to bottom:

auxiliary antenna
second nuclear energy source
still folded large antenna
plasmawave antennas
nuclear energy source (thermo-electrical generator)
magnetometer sensors

Wow! Cool!
The image seems to have been first published here http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/1992SSRv...60..457C

OWW - (thank you)^10000

Doug

Yes, the image on page 499 of the PDF file looks similar. But this PDF publication is from 1992, and my magazine is from december 1991. I guess Aviation Week first published it somewhere between april and november 1991 (without the dutch words smeared all over it). Anyone still has old Aviation Weeks lying around?

Unless somebody unearth it, I will have a look at AWST the next time I will go to my aerospace engineering library to research for "robotic exploration of the solar system part 2" (on 3 October, hopefully)

I finally found some time to look for it. The image was published in AWST on 24 June 1991 (page 54). The caption says:
"Galileo self-portrait by its near-infrared mapping spectrometer is believed to be the only image taken of an interplanetary spacecraft in cruise. Image was taken last November [i.e. 1990] before the Earth encounter and is from the "bottom" of the spacecraft looking along the spin axis toward the high-gain antenna, which is not deployed. Green indicates areas of thermal emission in the 5-micron band, with bright green indicating temperatures of about -30F and the darker green -60F. Red is 0.7 micron sun glint. Yellow areas are a combination of heat and glint. The RTGs are brighter than expected."
The self portrait therefore was not taken to support the stuck hga effort but was only a calibration test

Don't forget Venera 9,10,13 & 14. All of them photographed their landing torus and colour calibration target, as well as other assorted appendages.

The images taken by Luna 13 showing its shadow are pretty cool too.

This is still representative of the first and most fascinating (to me) self-portrait image I ever remember seeing -- even though it is only a very small portion of the spacecraft in the portaiture:

Click to view attachment

This is actually not the image I truly recall -- that one was taken in low-res 200-line mode, while this one here was taken in 600-line high-res mode.

-the other Doug

Here's a color version!

I have never seen it, but IIRC, there should be a picture of the nearby crashed descent stage from the first Soviet mission that returned pictures from the moon's surface.

Might have been Luna 3 ??

Neither the Luna 9 or 13 landers were able to recognize the deceleration stage in their surface panoramas. They didn't even clearly see any bounce marks as they rolled to their resting places. A LOT of the terrain was not well seen, either due to sun-glare when looking up sun, or with the tilt of the spacecraft such that a segment of the horizon was all that was visible in one quadrant (foreground below the field of view) Image quality was marginal to poor, as well.

Thanks for the information on that. It just might have been the sun glare.

I had always wondered how the lander could have been 'fired' from the carrier by springs, and then when the lander took a 360 degree panorama of it's surroundings, how it could have missed the carrier portion of the vehicle.

I figured the picture that showed the carrier might have revealed Soviet military secrets regarding MIRV warhead design or something.

Sun glare is just so 'prosaic' . . .



Thanks also for IDing the mission. FWIW, Luna 9 did image it's own antennas, so it is a valid member for inclusion in this this topic.

I did see an 'artists conception' of the carrier laying near the probe, but don't recall where for sure.

Might have been that Jane's book . . .

KAGUYA (SELENE) takes some pictures of itself

see JAXA site:

http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/10/20071009_kaguya_e.html

here is the one I like: ITS NEAR THE MOON!

(The image was taken around 3:10 p.m. on Oct. 5 (JST) about 800 km from the Moon.)

Yep -- but I believe that color version is from Surveyor III. It's from one of the missions that carried the robotic scoop. You can tell because the scoop was used to dump some soil onto the footpad so the camera could study its cohesiveness, grain size/distribution, etc.

-the other Doug