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."

Comments

Eat my goatse'd penis!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat my goatse'd penis!

Why is this free?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Why is this being posted, in full quality, for free? Millions of American taxpayer dollars have been spent gathering this priceless data that is totally unavailable in any other context, and the full-quality raw data is simply being given away online. I can guarantee you that any other nation's research programmes would not do this, their governments would not hear of it. Could you see the Chinese doing this? Or the Russians? At the least, the data should be kept for national interest reasons, with it only available to projects that advance the government's interest. Low-quality preview images could be released to the public if PR is an objective.

Answers I don't want to hear: America is #1, that's why they do it = a bunch of nonsense. Science wants to be free = also nonsense.

Re:Actually huge amount of terrain

[Anonymous Coward]

how is babby formed?