Space Imaging Many are aware that NASA's planetary missions are funded by the public. It's a little-known fact that this public investment has a direct return: the data that is sent back from spacecraft -- images, spectra, particle counts, and more -- are freely available to any member of the public. The science teams on planetary missions create many very pretty image products that are shown to the public via press releases and publications, but these represent only a tiny fraction of the vast treasure trove of data that is waiting to be discovered by anybody with the time and interest to dedicate to the search. Imaging data is available on the Internet for most NASA planetary missions that have been flown since the early 1970s. NASA maintains online archives of image data via the Planetary Data System, or PDS, enabling users to download images to their home computers. Missions usually deliver data to the PDS six months to a year after they have been acquired. Some recent NASA missions (including the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Mars Exploration Rover mission) make image data available on-line shortly after receipt through their own mission websites. For ESA missions, there is an online Planetary Science Archive (PSA) that is similar to the PDS, though data are delivered to it more slowly. Data from older missions are often more difficult for the general user to access and retrieve, since the earlier mission data archives were developed using older technology that predate the Internet and the widespread use of powerful home computers. Images from earlier planetary missions present other challenges as well, since many of them were taken using camera systems, such as vidicons, that were quite different from today's digital imaging devices. This section, now under development, will include a summary of the sources of planetary mission image data, an explanation of commonly used planetary image formats, a summary of software and tools that are available to access and retrieve imaging data, and tutorials demonstrating some of the most commonly used image processing techniques. Links will be provided to specific mission data archives and to tools now available in the public domain for processing planetary imagery. It takes time to learn to use these resources, but that time will be well rewarded with views of other worlds that very few people on Earth may have studied. If you have experience with processing space image data and would like to contribute a tutorial, please contact us. Recent Headlines 08 Jan 04 Spirit Returns More "Exquisite" Data, Inspires New Generation of Space Explorers | ||||
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Monday, August 27, 2007
Space Imaging
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