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Earth Departure Movie From MESSENGER Spacecraft
A reader writes:"The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft took 358 images during a gravity assist swingby of Earth on Aug. 2, 2005.
Those images were sequenced into an MPEG movie showing the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth."
Corale Cache everyone!!! MESSENGER Flyby
Here's the cache. Movie
Can be found here
-Sean (OutdoorDB - The Outdoor Wiki
http://puffin.tamucc.edu/~mwilliamson/torrents/mdi s_depart.mpeg.mpa.mpg.torrent
The movie starts when MESSENGER was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America on Aug. 2. It ends when the probe was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth - farther than the Moon's orbit - on Aug. 3.
Looking at the mpeg with the timestamps, it was pretty much exactly (8mins out) 24 hours, so that makes it travelling at an average speed of roughly 4.29 km/s.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
Actually, there was a great shot of Australia sweeping by and it was significantly darker before brightening again, because it has a relatively low specularity compared to the surrounding ocean (the hotspot was traveling over it.) The specular highlight was correct; the ocean does indeed have a highlight like that.
I think calculating a 23-degree angle with absolutely no point of reference would be a bit of a challenge (it assumes the probe's camera is aligned to the solar ecliptic, which is pretty unlikely.)
I think the problem is that most photos are very close and pretty much with the sun behind the photographer. Another good indication that this was real instead of animated - the complete lack of stars. Astronauts have commented that the reflected sunlight off of the earth completely drowns out the background stars - in other words, reality looks fake because it doesn't resemble the fake reality Hollywood has taught us to expect.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
If by 'collision' you mean 'collision of a cosmic ray with the detector, then yes.
Any meteor big enough to be visible from that far away would have been noticed by a LOT of people.
There is a nice flash over southern Africa when the Sun's specular highlight hits lake Tangaynika, though.
I was one of the team that worked hard to sequence this spacecraft operation, and I can assure you, it is quite real! MESSENGER, a NASA Discover program, was developed and is operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, is headed to the planet Mercury; not an easy place to get to. This flyby is the first of 6 (1 Earth, 2 Venus, 3 Mercury) that are required to put the spacecraft into Mercury orbit. Once there, the spacecraft will go into an elliptical orbit and commence a series of science observations. The extensive payload includes the following: narrow and wide angle imagers, LIDAR, X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutron sensors, magnetometer, visible, near IR and UV spectrometers, energetic particle and plasma sensors. The spacecraft did not take an approach video for two reasons. First, there were extensive instrument calibration efforts going on during that time (e.g. lunar and magnetospheric observations) that required specific spacecraft pointing. In addition, the solid state recorder space is limited, so we chose to get the single 24-hour sequence you see in the movie.
If you watch this with mplayer (at least version 1.0pre7), it will wrongly assume that the aspect ratio is 4:3. Just use the -noaspect option.
I don't know whose fault this is, but I suspect that the movie is badly encoded.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()