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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
I count a grand total of one reply in this thread, and already the site seems to be slashdotted. I guess this just proves that the existence of the silent majority of ./ readers who actually try to RTFA before they post. My faith in humanity is restored!
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
Here's the cache. Movie
Since the editors still think that 640kb of memory should be enough for everyone (including themselves, considering dupes and always forgetting about mirrors), here's the Coral cache.
These images have a calming, peaceful effect. It is amazing how beautiful the earth looks from a far and how chaotic it seems when your in it! Get me out of here :)
Interesting. If I didn't know better, I would've said that this is a POV-Ray animation...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Can be found here
-Sean (OutdoorDB - The Outdoor Wiki
"The MESSENGER MPEG-hosting server took 358 images during a slashdot assist launch off of Earth on Sep. 5, 2005. Those images were sequenced into an MPEG movie showing the view from the MESSENGER MPEG-hosting server as it departed Earth."
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very important that you get away as soon as possible.
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House -- (202) 456-1414 -- to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. If all these attemps fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
I'm assuming the earth was probably too bright to get stars .. and it looks like this might have been inside the moon's orbit.
Breathtaking video though. Very cool.
..don't panic
This is the real deal! The Earth is getting smaller in a realistic manner witch I've never seen before. I wonder what kind of acceleration and speed we are taling about here? These would be completely different figures in the movie and the real event. Someone care to do the math?
Don't you just love the reflection of the Sun? And the absence of a "glowing" atmosphere halo? This is what the Earth really look like. Please render planets like this when you do SciFi flicks in the future!
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
http://puffin.tamucc.edu/~mwilliamson/torrents/mdi s_depart.mpeg.mpa.mpg.torrent
I think slashdot news posters must *love* to get people posting comments about their links getting slashdotted. So, here is another rant... "ah, slashdotted already".
Either that or they have a running king-of-the-hill contest on who can slashdot a site the fastest.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I don't get it - where is the audio on this thing? In the background there must have been either:
1. A swooshy spaceship noice
or
2. The opening bars of the Star Trek: TNG theme tune
With the current state of CGI and a world awash with 'fake' scifi images running all the way back to 2001: A space Odyssey, it's a shame that this footage just looks so 'plain' even though it's 'the real thing'. Mind you, I find Google Earth truly fascinating.
AT&ROFLMAO
go frame by frame for some interesting events.
most spectacular is the flash 27 frames from the end. looks like it could be lightning or a large meteor.
comment directly in my journal
I'm sure they could be taken as simply a successful test of the probes systems, but they also capture peoples imagination and help keep the space program going.
Greasemonkey
Script to auto add mirrordot and coralcache links to stories.
Seriously, stop whining and take matters into your own hands.
Is that our planet? It is quite hard to distinguish anything.
I think I can see the north-west part of Australia at about 1/3rd of the movie, the land being amazingly black. At about 2/3rds one can see (in the topleft "corner") Saudi-Arabia, followed by northern Africa, both golden/yellowish. Now why is that so much brighter than the deserts of Australia.
I'm also surprised by the fact that we see the line where the sun goes down, which suggests that the Messenger is going into a retrograde direction. Isn't that unusual?
I'd expect a satellite that is to go to an inner orbit to pass outside the earth's orbit. That seems to pan out, because we start with something more like a sickle, going to "half earth".
Bert
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
Has anyone played with that Orbetor Simulator?
Seeing this animation made me realize just how good that programmer is. The visualizations on that simulator nailed it pretty well. And it's free too!
Ok I got a question about the spacecraft's orbit!
From the video, the spacecraft seems to be travelling at the opposite direction of earth's translation (i.e. clockwise in the ecliptic plane, viewing from sun's north to south hemisphere), because the dayside is at the left, and the Earth is, well, becoming smaller...
But, this diagram of messenger's orbit from the article in wikipedia shows that the spacecraft travells in the counter-clockwise direction (same as the planets)... so, I would conclude that the spacecraft speed is less than the Earth's orbital speed.
Question: is that correct?
Open the file in text editor and take all the characters from the end and put them one-by-one at the beginning until you've turned the entire file around.
It's almost as if posting to /. increases the traffic on a site, making that site useless for a while. I wonder if anyone has invented a name for this effect?
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__()
The Earth is so bright, it overpowers the stars. If you play with your brightness and exposure, you may be able to see faint outlines of them, however the movie isn't the highest quality movie ever, so it may take a lot of fiddling with your controls. Rest assured however, I have not stolen them all yet.
Look there are no stars in the background! It's the same as with the moon landing videos! Space is filled with billions of stars! Where are they? I demand an investigation into what NASA is really spending our money on!!!
No sig for you!!
Have some digity!
;)
Not to mention composre and decorm!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Not to mention composre and decorm! ;)
Heh. Not sure what composre and decorm mean*, but I think "having some digity" means to posess a plurality of fingers.
* they sound like they might be UNIX utilities. e.g. "run 'composre -w -all' to flush the /dev/null cache", and "decorm functions just like rm, only with a 1930's architechtural flair"....
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's hard to believe those images came from Messenger. We've never seen a view of Earth by an interplanetary spaceship flying by in such clarity. Normally the cameras are fixed to the exact focus needed by the mission and only record a few colors.