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First Images From 50-km Enceladus Flyby
CheshireCatCO writes "The first pictures from yesterday's flyby of Enceladus are now public. At closest approach, Cassini was set spinning to cancel out the apparent motion of Enceladus so as to capture unsmeared images during the 40,000-mph flyby. Although it wasn't clear that this would work (errors in pointing could easily have made the cameras miss their targets), the maneuver panned out beautifully, producing spectacular images of the surface. Images show the 'tiger stripes' at the south pole, including at least one location that has been identified as a source of a jet, as well as considerable vertical relief, easily visible thanks to the low sun-angle near the south pole at present. Processed, enhanced images should follow shortly."
For comparison, when the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter took photos of the Martian moon Phobos, it did so at a 6.8m=1 pixel scale, which came out to a 3,374 by 3,300 pixel image for one side. If a scale of 20.2m=1 pixel on average is assumed on average for these, then a picture of the whole thing like would be about 22,074 by 22,074 pixels, or 487 megapixels. That's assuming they didn't even do the same locations twice from different angles or something.
Does this mean I'll be able to switch from Phobos to Enceladus as my desktop background soon?
How many billion dollars did we spend to get one or two postcard photos?
About 1.7. If someone has more exact, up-to-date Cassini budget figures, let us know. For comparison, this is slightly less than 1/330th the budget to-date for the American war effort in Iraq. With a tenth of the war budget, we could send 3 or more likely 4 Cassini-class missions to every major planetary body in the solar system, and have the other 90% of the war budget to spend on eliminating world hunger 12 to 13 times over (I'm using the conservative estimate here and rounding down). Or whatever.
But that's not the point. These images are not "postcards"; they are scientific-quality imagery; I believe CheshireCatCO elaborated on this somewhere else, perhaps even in the other slashdot story he linked in this very summary. $2 billion for postcards is unreasonable, but not so unreasonable for doing science in-situ at Saturn.
Typical fucking Americans.
Spirited attempt to round out your troll, but you already betrayed yourself an American yourself with that little "we're even spending bit.
I read slashdot often but reply seldom enough I just do it anonymously. Jerks like you give anonymous posters a bad name and undermine the viability of communicating via the anonymity mechanism. I want to state for the record and for the readership that not all slashdot ACs are insufferable trolls, and that some valuable contributions are made by drive-by or lurking participants piecemeal, anonymously. I try to lead by example; feeding an obvious and unabashed troll will do no good of course, but offering useful commentary to others will.
Anyway, I suspect that your post will receive its richly deserved troll or flaimbait moderation in due time.
(although not on the imaging/planetary science side of things), it's important to note how incredibly successful Cassini-Huygens has been. Projects such as Cassini are where the 'space' budget needs to be spent, not on trinkets like the International Space Station.
-irb
It's precisely because it was funded by taxpayer dollars that it's being given away for free.
There are bucketloads of data that are not being released to the public - releasing photos of any quality is just plain good PR and the value of a normal light photo is almost inconsequential. Making your American Taxpayer jump through hoops to get hold of these photos would be counterproductive. Given your apparent overreaction (they're not releasing designs for fusion reactors after all) you appear to attach far greater importance to these pictures than they intrinsically possess.
And if you think that US research is done totally in isolation, well guess again.