Like we're floating alongside.... hurry up Phobos-Grunt!

Wow. That is nice!
What causes the wavy appearance of the Martian limb?

A slight rocking of the spacecraft during the scan. If it had just rotated to take this off-nadir view the long booms might not have settled down yet.

Phil

Ahhhh...yeah, makes sense; I thought it was some sort of processing artifact.

I guess a combination of Mars Express tracking Phobos and that HRSC has a linescan camera.

Strange stone, alien vapor . . . .

Fran Lebowitz

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for the heads up!

Last night I spent close to 3 hours browsing that data release, and it's just bursting at the seams with beautiful images. One of them I came across by accident shows Gusev crater and what must surely be the shadow of Phobos on the landscape to the south. ( I've tweaked the contrast a teeny bit to make it look a bit more dramatic )

Click to view attachment

Wow!

That Gusev picture is fabulous.

MEx wide-angle images have always impressed me, but, boy, this set is exceptional! Well-spotted, Stu.

Thanks very much Stu for bringing that Gusev image to the fore... it's a belter!

Any idea of the date the Phobos pictures were taken? I know I could check myself, but I am traveling and accessing this through my mobile, so if someone could dig this info for me...

Orbit 7982
FILE_NAME = "H7982_0000_ND2.IMG
SPACECRAFT_CLOCK_START_COUNT = "1/0217685770.09082"
SPACECRAFT_CLOCK_STOP_COUNT = "1/0217686149.55887"
START_TIME = 2010-03-26T12:18:52.587Z
STOP_TIME = 2010-03-26T12:19:28.559Z

A couple photos (one rendered in 3D) have been released from the Phobos fly-by of 09 Jan 2011. They are on the ESA Mars Express blog, at
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/blog/7

The planned landing sites for Phobos-Grunt are shown.

Not many images, but very nice ones.

They are very nice, and they also provide useful illustrations for the differences between HRSC and SRC and also how the way HRSC gets its simultaneous stereo. I would love to see one of our morph magicians produce a tweened animation of the 5-image view of Phobos near the bottom!

I'm not yet one of the magicians but I have been fascinated by the application of morphing with images like these, so here's my effort . . .

EDIT:
revised AVI and gif

Yes, these images looks seductively
But now these images aren't public property and I'm not copyright owner.
It looks like situation in year 2009 with my comet Halley animation, but now these images aren't raw images.
Nevertheless I tried animate these images, I have first step (transition between first and second image).
Good news is, that it's possible and it's in full HD. Bad news is that it's bloody time-consuming and it's on the edge of my PC capabilities.

ElkGD, that is pretty darn good! thanks!

Finally, it's finished.
Phobos animation from five Mars Express images taken by HRSC camera.
Original images copyright: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G.Neukum).

Youtube

Gorgeous, Machi. Thank you.

Thanks!

I just added two avi versions of Phobos animation.
Full resolution 1920×1200 AVI (13.7 MB) (this is in fact full original resolution, youtube version is reduced to 1920×1080) and reduced resolution 1024×640 AVI (5.9 MB).

Drool...

I notice that Emily's 5 image montage here http://www.planetary.org/image/image5-492-...PhobosFlyby.jpg can be viewed cross-eyed to yield four 3D versions. Presumably a 3D movie experience could be achieved by viewing two side by side copies of Machi's excellent movie with a small time offset.

I haven't software for this, but whole 3D animation (little shorter) is possible. Something like Luca Cassioli made from animation of comet Hartley.

... and here are some new ones showing Phobos AND Jupiter !!! Enjoy...
Click to view attachment

Phobos & Jupiter in Conjunction

Sorry if this was covered somewhere else, but I didn't see it mentioned here. A couple weeks ago, ESA published a new Phobos fly-by video.

You can see it at:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMHGWD1XOG_index_0.html

It shows Phobos in conjunction with Jupiter. Includes a Phobos image in 3D.

there isn't a thread for Deimos, so I will post here this interesting paper just published (free of charge if registered):
New astrometric observations of Deimos with the SRC on Mars Express

The official ESA web release about the improved Deimos orbit determination done by MEX is here.

The Astronomy and Astrophysics paper on the Deimos measurements is here.

naif update
ftp://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_...r085_deimos.txt
ftp://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_...r085_phobos.txt
mar097.bsp

first image from the 22 December flyby
http://blogs.esa.int/mex/2013/12/24/merry-...m-mars-express/

Worth noting that that entry on the ESA Mars Express blog actually refers back to UMSF.

From Daniel Scuka's blog entry: "Looking for a challenge? Let us know where on Phobos you think this image is located (there's a cool 'map' of Phobos over at UnmannedSpaceflight.com)."

Daniel Scuka is Senior Editor for Spacecraft Operations at ESOC, ESA's European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.

Phobos animation using a shape model...

http://spaceinvideos.esa.int/Videos/2013/12/Phobos_360

the "phobos_ver512q.tab" mesh from
VO1_SA_VISA_VISB_5_PHOBOSSHAPE_V1_0.zip
from the pds small bodies node

displays in Blender


it basically is a .obj mesh

As is mentioned in an ESA web release about the recent close flyby of Phobos by Mars Express, "[t]he orbit of Mars Express has been fine-tuned to get us as close to Phobos as possible during a handful of flybys between 2023 and 2025". A quick WebGeocalc search gives five flyby opportunities with a distance to the surface of less than 100 km during this period:

Date ............ Distance to surface [km]

2023-07-21 ... 52

2024-01-09 ... 55
2024-05-30 ... 62
2024-11-15 ... 45

2025-09-16 ... 40

So mark your calendar and let's hope Mars Express isn't switched off by then.

Looking forward to those close flybys. I'm especially wanting images from close flybys of the blue-white toned and the ochre toned areas on Phobos. As well as another, closer pass with the MARSIS instrument.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2...rface_of_Phobos

Mars Express certainly needs to continue. MMX's planners would certainly be grateful for more data.

Since Exomars is being delayed for so long, there's surely a small amount of money in the ESA budget, right? Extended missions are generally much cheaper to run than a primary mission, with the smaller teams and efficiency/experience of those still working on it.

Having a mission be delayed usually means it's going to cost MORE money.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63336201

In this case "up to €360m"

That said - I would be very surprised if ESA couldn't find the relatively modest budget to keep MEX going until the spacecraft is no longer functional.

In the long term yes, but that would all be spread out over the next 8-10 years. Since these Phobos flybys are in the next 2 years, the costs of the primary Exomars mission would be being spent right now if not for the delay.
The peak cost is the period before and during a primary mission, from what I read in NASA budgets (like the charts and tables here which show a sort of bell curve and a long 'tail' of minimal expenses for extended missions). I'm assuming the logic works the same with ESA missions.
Sorry to get a bit into the weeds on this, but there should be no excused to cancel scientifically significant flybys of a very interesting object!

Spacecraft get cheaper once you launch them.

Look at New Horizons, MSL, OSIRIS REX, Juno etc in the amazing TPS Google Doc.

The moment you launch them - the cost plummets by a factor of about 4+

The two years of prime mission for MSL averaged ~$80M
The six years before that averaged >$300M.

Put another way - the ExoMars rover is going to be more expensive now than when it's actually operating. It's going to be more expensive over the next 5 years than had it launched on time and was operating in the same time frame.

But again - I agree - the cost of operating MEX is in the weeds compared to the new costs for ExoMars. I fully expect MEX to keep going. Remember - we've had the same "The budget goes to zero in a year" for many other Mars missions that have carried on for year and years thereafter as the budget was found. MSL, Odyssey, MER...all saw similar fiscal outlooks at certain points.

Well, likely true, but this can depend on how the mission plays out. If they just cancelled it outright it wouldn't cost "anything" (except substantial runout costs, I suspect.) And they could put it into some form of deep hibernation and it might not cost as much as delayed missions under active development would cost for the same period, though this is rarely done (DSCOVR is sort of an example.) Of course, if they end up flying it, it will cost far more than it would have when Russia was involved.

Bottom line for MEx; despite statements to the contrary, active missions are rarely cancelled if they are still at all productive. The larger worry for MEx is that the spacecraft is low on fuel, but this seems to have been mitigated to a larger degree than was thought previously (I'm assuming that's just not excessive optimism on someone's part.)

For MEX, the fuel might be a problem if we go into a few safe modes for some reason. But there hasn't been one for a long time.

Right now, one of the biggest potential issues is loss of the gyros. The laser diodes in the gyros are degrading with time, at different rates. At the European Spaceflight Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, the flight control team is amazing. They've found ways to reduce use of the gyros significantly. But they won't last forever.

Funny how time flies (When you're having fun)

On Friday 21 July at around 05:04:47 UTC, Mars Express (MEX) will make a close flyby of Phobos at a distance to the surface of just 48.4 km, according to the latest MEX SPICE Kernel Dataset (SKD), via WebGeocalc (WGC).

My clumsy freehand overlay of a WGC-generated Nadir Ground-track plot on a colour-coded topographic map of Phobos seems to be in good agreement with the corresponding Sub-point radius vs. Time plot. The blue arrow shows the flight direction, the two concentric circles mark the point of closest approach to the surface, the small dots on the plot are one second apart, and the length of the plot between start at 05:03:42.465 and end at around 05:05:54.924 UTC is the time period when the distance between MEX and the centre of Phobos is less than 200 km.

Click to view attachment

While we are still patiently waiting for information about the implementation of the last Phobos flyby of Mars Express, the next flyby, in a series of close flybys, is due to take place at around 02:17:05 UTC on Tuesday, 9 January; passing within 55 km of the surface at closest approach.