Does anyone know when the Cassini images (including those of Jupiter) are scheduled to start appearing on the PDS ? Ages ago I read somewhere that the Jupiter images would be released a year after SOI. I wonder if some images of Saturn will be released then or not until late August (the start of Rev A) - it is now already well over a year since Cassini started imaging Saturn on a regular basis.

Good question.


Also was Venus also part of this image release?

A line from the JPL RAW webpages has this:

This initial release of the web site includes data collected since May 14, 2004, but will eventually include the raw images Cassini has collected since the beginning of the mission.


But it's said that since July last year.

Here is the official line...

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Admin/reso...ms_cassini.html

But as you will discover - neither of the interesting documents are available.

Might be worth an email - the PDS is usually quite repsonsive

Doug

I decided to email the PDS. Hopefully they'll reply.

There is a five year old version of "Cassini/Huygens Program: Archive Plan of Science Data" available here

It is the initial release version of this document, and was last updated in August of 2000.

According to the schedule listed in there, 3 cruise datasets, the SOI dataset, and the first regular submission (which seem occur once per Titan flyby) should have all been submitted by now.
I guess the timelines have changed. Hopefully we can find a newer version of the plan somewhere else that will give the updated timelines.

Apparently not in this case - three days since I emailed them and still no reply . And I'm pretty sure I emailed the correct address at the PDS Imaging Node.

Well - I got a great repsonse when I asked about MGS data releases a while back - so I will reply to that address about it.

Doug

I tried finding the email with all this info I could have sworn I had one with the PDS schedule...

Anyways, the first release, which covers all data from launch to SOI is on July 1. Each releases is 3 months after that, with releases coming every three months or so. The releases will come such that the last releases, cover the period to the end of the nominal mission, comes out three months after the end of the mission.

Some raw images are now available at this location:

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/coiss_2001/

(I discovered this after downloading the entire collections of Viking Lander images).

Seems mostly calibration-related stuff but there are images there of Saturn and the rings that are helpful for figuring out the data format, PDS labels etc. (it looks like I'll have to make some modifications to my software to more easily handle Cassini images). I'm not sure this data is supposed to be 'official' yet though.

One rather frustrating discovery is that these PDS files do not contain any viewing geometry information.

PDS Schedule:



Due date on the first of the month indicated

This should be quite a big release.

I think it's 11 DVDs. Fire up your computers!

When the images are finally released, will there be RAD images (or some equivalent) like they have with the MERs, or will we have to calibrate the images ourselves? And if we have to calibrate them ourselves, will there at least be software available that I can actually use to do so with?

I'm not sure. We have our own calibration software but I am not sure if that is being made available along with the PDS release. The guys who work on that software do read this board so maybe they can answer that. Unfortunately, I pay little attention to archiving when it comes up in telecons.

Well, if nothing like RAD will be available I hope sufficient information (as well as calibration files) will be made available for me and others to be able to figure out how to calibrate the data. This shouldn't be too difficult to add to my software, including IMG2PNG which some of you here may be familiar with. But availability of RAD (or something comparable) makes things easier.

Bjorn (looking forward to downloading a few tens of gigabytes early next month )

Will that data also make it's way to the RAW website too? It does say that it will eventually include all the images obtained since launch.

The PDS release should include JPEG versions, not to be used for Science (but Nature or Icarus is fine )

IT'S THERE !!

Take a look at http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/cassini_orbiter/

I don't know if this is the entire collection of Cassini images scheduled for official release next July 1 but I suspect so. I'm just starting to 'digest' this and poke around but I have already found spectacular images of Jupiter.

EDIT: It's now in the Planetary Image Atlas as well: http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/Atlas/ (however, the link there doesn't seem to work at the moment).

Will we see some unseen images?


I'm curious of the Jupiter flyby.

All of the images obtained by Cassini from launch through September 2004 seem to be there - 16 DVDs . IIRC about 26,000 images were obtained during the Jupiter flyby.

However, the calibration volumes do not seem to be there, only the data volumes. The calibration volumes should contain calibration files and calibration software source code. This means that currently it does not seem possible to get something like I/F from the raw images

Something VERY odd happens when I download some of these .img files, theyre about 2mb, but I get a transfer speed of 48-50kbs instead of the normal 3.5-4.5 - i'm on dialup !!!!!!! Any idea how this could happen?

Do you click to save them, then wait a bit...then say where to?

Because it's already started downloading it, but when the dialogue box comes up, it's already got SOME of it, so the aparant speed is faster

Doug

I use save target as in firefox, and just click save... takes about 2 seconds, NO WAY could it have started downloading. The speed is up and down. tried it just now, got 13.5kbs. But earlier I got between 48-50 - it downlaoded one of the 2mb .img files in about 20 secs - notmally takes 3-4minutes. I'm getting my normal download speeds with everything else though. VERY strange.

I've got a 2 Mbit line and the file came at 2 Mbytes/s. Zipping the image reduced the file size almost tenfold.

Those images are not compressed, so compression during transmission is effective. Try downloading a very large text file, and you see similar "speedups".

The calibration files should be showing up very soon:

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/ca...ent/archsis.txt

describes the directory structure specifically mentions calibration files will be included along with source code for CISSCAL.

Here is a quick-and-dirty example of what can be done with the raw images of Jupiter:

Here CB1 is used as red and GRN and BL1 as green and blue. This looks much more similar to Jupiter as seen through a telescope from Earth than the images released by the Cassini imaging team. I suspect gamma was adjusted in the 'officially released' color images, resulting in higher contrast and stronger limb darkening.

Also, many of the 'officially released' images used an average of the red and blue channels for the green channel. (What, do they think we're still in the pioneer era or something?)

In many cases a green image was not taken so it needs to be synthesized. In addition, a red image is often not available so (apparently) CB2 was used instead and CB2 is a near-infrared filter (or possibly a synthetic red image was generated from CB2 and blue).

And I have also noticed that NAC images taken through the red filter are very rare; usually CB1 is used as red when CB1 is available. This is not a problem since CB1 is centered at 619 nm IIRC.

Red filtered images might be more frequent elsewhere in the data although I doubt it; however as I write this I only have about 6000 of the PDS formatted raw images.

Two days past October 1 and still no new Cassini images at the PDS (although the fact that October 1 was a Saturday is probably a factor). The next batch of Cassini images was to appear on October 1...

Now I see the Cassini ISS data release has been delayed to October 9. Could have been worse...

This release (containing images from October-December 2004) has lots of interesting stuff: Two Titan flybys, 'Voyager-class' flybys of Tethys, Dione and Iapetus, a Saturn atmospheric movie and spectacular views of the rings (including the unlit side) are some of the highlights I remember.

And now it apparently is available despite the fact that the PDS Imaging node main page says it has been delayed to October 9:

http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov/data/cassini/cassini_orbiter/

Seems it is only available at the above link though. And 'only' two DVDs (coiss_2007 and coiss_2008) to download this time compared to 16 DVDs last time (actually a bit less than two DVDs now since a small part of coiss_2007 was released 3 months ago and coiss_2008 may not be a full DVD).

Looks like it is everything up till the just after the Iapetus encounter

Hi Bjorn, how do you download these things? Are you just right-clicking and saving each file one at a time? Does anybody know if there any way to automate the download of the files via HTTP or get them via FTP? Years ago it was possible to obtain all data from the PDS via FTP but I can't seem to find a way to do that anymore -- does anybody have any tips?

--Emily

I use various mass downloaders (manually downloading 50,000+ files takes too much time ). The one I found fastest and easiest to use is SurfOffline. However, originally it was very unstable and frequently crashed on the computers I used it on. The frequency of crashes seemed system dependent (it didn't crash as often on my laptop as on my desktop computer). Despite these crashes I preferred it to other mass downloaders I have tried for this particular type of download. I corresponded a bit with its author and got a new version that was a lot more stable than the one I originally had but not perfect.

There should be lots of people here that have used various mass downloaders, for example Doug has all of the PDS MER images IIRC.

The PDS MER imagery (well, just Pancam) is on the geosciences node FTP server (umm...heck, where is it...errr... AHH http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/dataserv/anonftp.html details there )

BUT - Navcam and Hazcam data isnt in there, Pancam, MI, APXS, Mossbauer, MiniTES, and Des cam is.

Other missions in there, Clementine, Magellan, MEX, MGS, MPF, NEAR, MODY, VIKO, VIKL, Venera..

Things I really REALLY want them to have in there, MER Engineering camera data, and the RAD Pathfinder data set

HERE however - http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/ - is everything from the imaging node, and indeed, using a program called surf-offline ( it's terrible, but it just about works ) I got SOME stuff off their, including the Sojourner CD.

Doug

VIMS data through the Iapetus flyby is also available Going to look at the Tortola Facula feature.

Here are a couple of VIMS frames of Iapetus. Red is wavelength 200 (2.582 microns), green is wavelength 150 (1.754 microns), and blue is wavelength 100 (0.933 microns)

Here is a very poor quality VIMS mosaic from Ta. Red is 2.781 microns, Green is 2.034 microns, and blue is 1.602 microns

Images used are v1477473027_6, v1477473988_1, v1477474917_1, v1477475933_1, v1477476864_1, and v1477477826_1

Great work! As for what it means...

The aqua/greenish hue, were this an airless world, would say something about the surface being something that has a broad reflectance peak around 2 microns (or some sharp ones at 2.0/1.6). But in this case, isn't it possible/likely that it says more about the spectral holes (which is simply a comment on methane -- yawn!), with no info about the surface until some really hairy analysis sorts out the brightness vs. the intrinsic width/depth of the holes? I think that's so. Still, love to see these images -- and I prefer your choice to keep the mapping to RGB over the official VIMS releases from, eg, T0, where they bizarrely changed the sequence in their IR->RGB mapping!

Thanks for the suggestion, Bjorn. I tried SurfOffline yesterday and it got about 3 GB of one disk before it started stubbornly crashing every time I tried to use it. I sent an email and to my surprise they replied within a couple of hours with an upgrade. I tried the upgraded version on a second disk and had no problems. Knock on wood.

By the way, I am now dancing around my office, singing "I love data! I love data!" I haven't had time to play with the image data yet but I am digging into the index.tab file on each disk and finding it to contain MUCH more information about each image than they provided for, say, Voyager. There is a very complete list of positional information for the spacecraft with respect to the target, lat and lon on each of the corners of the image, clock angle to north, radial position for rings images, a complete list of every body visible in the image, etc. etc. etc. Absolutely tremendous. It's killing me that I don't have time to play with this right now -- thanks everybody for posting your efforts here! Anybody working on those Iapetus IR3-GRN-UV3 mosaics?

--Emily

I am so busy right now that I will not be able to jump into this until next week. Although I have some Voyager Neptune and Uranus stuff in the pipeline, there is only one Saturnian image I am almost done with...I am glad of this, because other than tweaking the color in my Dione over Saturn image, I don't think I will be fooling with Voyager Saturn pictures for quite a while, given the motherload of Cassini images just released.

One interesting thing about SO is that if it is downloading several files simultaneously (usually the case) you may be able to finish the download by *not* clicking OK when you receive a 'crash-like' error message - SO doesn't shut down until you click OK. The message often applies to just one of the several 'download channels' so the other ones may continue normally. Usually one file will be missing when the download ends though - the file that was being downloaded when the error message appeared.


Yes, lots of useful info. However, one thing that has been extremely irritating to me is the fact that the north azimuth is erroneous for lots of images - if there's anyone who works on this lurking here please take note . This includes probably the majority of the images of Saturn but I haven't checked the satellite images yet. This is bad because I plan to make an approximately 9000x4500 pixel simple cylindrical map of Saturn using the recently released images. My 7560x3780 map of Jupiter is almost finished - this was also a problem in that case. Interestingly, the other labels are correct in these images and in lots of cases it is possible to 'guess' the north azimuth from adjacent images.

BTW I now have the data from all of the index.tab files in an Access database file. Were it not for its size (more than 100 MB) I'd make it available for download somewhere. It is extremely useful for finding something like all of the interesting satellite images (the ones obtained from a distance less than e.g. 300,000 km).

I always use "Target North Azimuth", that one never steers me wrong (though I don't work on Saturn images).

Ah, but this is interesting! The bright aqua-green area in Xanadu -- maybe Tui Regio is the official name? -- shows a lot more detail in the VIMS view than in the usually released CICLOPS images. In this view it really looks like some kind of a mountain range. Nice!

I just noticed this is the same view, with different color choices, posted by the VIMS team here.



Their image uses Red is 2.7 microns, Green is 5 microns, Blue is 2 microns.
I think you can see better surface detail with your choices...

Yeah, that bright area in Xanadu is Tui Regio. As to why it is so bright, not sure. Unless something bright is condensing on the mountain tops, I don't think we are seeing a mountain range, but that is certainly a possibility.

And this image shows less detail than our images, but you don't need to process these images nearly as much.

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/d...by-cassini.html

Titan's bright spot revealed by Cassini

The Cassini spacecraft has spotted the brightest area yet on Saturn's moon, Titan - but how it formed remains a mystery.

Okay, "more detail" was clearly the wrong description. Maybe I should have said "different detail". Of course, your images have a much higher resolution. But the VIMS data do show things that aren't as apparant at the 938nm filter you use. In any of the ISS images or mosaics of the Xanadu region, it is hard to distinguish any sort of eastern edge to Tui. The region doesn't stand out there like it does at these longer wavelengths.

One reason I thought it might be higher is maybe it sticks above the haze to appear brighter. I remember reading somewhere -- ah, here in a VIMS team press release -- that it is possible to map elevation by seeing how much methane absorption there is.