I just submitted my abstract (small body maps). Anyone going to be there?

Phil

Possibly.

Yup - doing demos of Eyes on the Solar System for almost the whole conference.

I basically submitted a placeholder abstract concerning Pioneer data, with the hope that I will find more of it when I am at Ames in January. If I don't find anything, what I have to present will be very thin.

I'm in. Two abstracts submitted. (geology/hydrology near Sikun Labyrinthus, Titan)

Looks like a UMSF evening gathering might be in order!

Phil

Somebody better bring a camera...

Darn I wish I had something to contribute. I wonder if they'd accept a lunar stand-up comedy routine?

ABSTRACT:

James Irwin walks into a bar in Oceanus Procellarum carrying a lump of anorthosite. The bartender says, "Get lost buddy, that old thing doesn't belong here."

Thank you, thank you.... I'll be here all week.

Heck, why not? Surely planetary science is by now a mature enough field for its own dedicated stand-up comedian!

SECOND ABSTRACT

A blond astronaut is leaving the airlock of her lunar habitat on the way to her sporty little LM just as her husband gets home and asks where she's going.

"I wrote a letter to NASA asking for a raise and six weeks vacation each year for both of us, and now I have to take it to Shackleton Crater," she tells him.

"Why Shackleton Crater" he asks.

"Becauuuuuuse..." the blond wife replies, "The NASA Director said I should put it where the sun doesn't shine."

Dan, I forgive you.

Does anyone know if there are any titan-related abstracts submitted by Vincent Chevirer? I read this article last year on plans for a titan simulation chamber, and I'm hoping to hear some news on how its progressing (or perhaps even that they've done some preliminary experiments).

Ummm... The first manned expedition to Titan finds a man swaiting by the shore of Ontario Lacus with a surfboard. When asked what he was doing there he replied: 'Dude in a bar on Ceres told me the surf here's gonna be amazing when this cold snap ends!'

[tumbleweed rolls by].....Please don't shoot me.

I'm probably going. Not really presenting (3rd author on one poster), but want to attend and definitely want to see the Decadel Survey unveiling.

At the risk of suggesting the obvious, why don't you ask him...?

I had a nice visit to his lab (and gave a Barringer lecture) in Arkansas at the beginning of last month -
I expect his group will have a number of LPSC submissions; several of his students were doing Titan-related
work.

Is he on the forum? I've had alook at the usernames list and theres a Vincent.... I'm hesitant to e-mail his listed address, some people don't take kindly to being pestered by random strangers!

Ask nicely, ask politely, no one would object to a polite email about the science they're doing.

The very worst he can do is ignore you, and you're no worse off.

Good advice, thanks!

If all goes well I will be there as an attendee for my first conference.

LPSC abstracts are up at:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2011/pdf/program.pdf

- and there's lots of good stuff, including Opportunity's plans for the coming year, Hartley 2, geology of Mimas and many lunar goodies.

Phil

I've "cold" emailed several distinguished planetary scientists with simple questions or requests. I've always gotten a gracious and prompt response.

Tom

I made for me (because I have sometimes very unstable internet connection) file for downloading all LPSC 2011 abstracts and rtf file for offline searching.
This can be useful to someone else, so I send these files here.
lpsc2011.html is history file from Free Download Manager (FDM). All files in this file can be simply downloaded by FDM or similar software (just open, right click and download all by FDM).
This file doesn't include files from pages >5 in sess321.pdf, sess335.pdf, sess609.pdf and sess636.pdf.
LPSC2011.rtf includes text from all session's files (except lectures times).

I made a blog entry with my poster and a link to the abstract. I will be presenting Thursday night. http://planetimages.blogspot.com/2011/03/w...nd-my-2011.html

Interesting project and nice poster! Looking forward for the results.

I've tried to build a Pioneer 10 / 11 gallery with corrected images based on what I could find the web (http://www.astrosurf.com/nunes/explor/explor_pioneer.htm).
One thing that would simplify things would be a list of all avaliable images with associated data, namely the start/end times.
That would allow for some geometry and rotation correction, unless all the images were scanned over the same amount of time. I got some tentative global mosaics out of the datasets, but they are mostly a best fit and not a correct reconstruction.

There's some info here http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/app2.htm but not enough to know if for example all the images were indeed usable or received.

Yes, I am familiar with your work, and those mosaics are impressive. Still, if we had the digital data and and image times, the scans could be properly mapped on to the Jovian globe, which, using interpolation, could theoretically lead to a proper movie. I think I might be able to make one from the Pioneer 11 receding images. The problem is that images that are relatively close are impacted by planetary rotation during the scans. The more distant images took less time and are thus less affected. They are, however, lower resolution than can be achieved with a telescope. However, the uniqueness of looking down on the Jovian north pole makes up for that. The problem is finding a way to consistently process scans from various sources.

As far as I understand, the analog images only have some general geometrical correction. That didn't take into account the planet's rotation and changing field of view, so it's still possible to compensate for that if we have good timing and position information, even from the analog sources (compute field of view). I did it using guess work and applying a diagonal distortion ( \ ) along the planet's disk. It kind of works but it's far from perfect.
Another option would be to use ground telescopic images as reference. I couldn't find any on the web for the same dates, though.

Regarding the different sourced scans, I'd choose an arbitrary Jupiter reference image (ex: Cassini) and then try to match the histograms as best as possible. Tedious but doable.

I'm sure you will solve all the problems and please excuse my naive suggestions.
Looking forward to that polar movie !

I am not exactly sure if this might be of help to those who are interested in past ISAS/JAXA publications.

http://repository.tksc.jaxa.jp/

This URL accepts alphabetical search words. Some are written in English (and mostly in Japanese, I think), but at least captions are all in English.

Pandaneko

No, these are real issues. That is why I am planning to mainly work with some of the more distant images over the north pole. They are small enough that there is relatively little distortion.