Hi,
I was fascinated by the first flyby image that was
released (the one featured on APOD). Despite its generally
fuzzy appearance, there is a lot of detail buried in there
that I hope we'll get to see when the wizards are through
massaging the images for detail and content.
I took a copy of that image and squeezed it as hard as I
could. I doubled the spacing of all the pixels and filled in
the intermediate spaces with eight-way median values, twiddled
with its histogram to re-distribute the greyscale values to a
more normal distribution, then stomped all over it with a
square sharpness filter.
I found that is LOTS of detail there, although my
ham-handed efforts left some messy artifacts. For example, the
"crater-like" circular features do not have uniformly shaded
bottoms. They're not smooth (nor flat I would guess), but
usually show a single deep dark conoid pit that's probably a
large primary vent for outgassing.
The walls of these "crater-like" features show some linear
features, as if the depressions had formed by a slump-like
collapse, perhaps from the rapid removal of material from
beneath the "slump" by outgassing. Lots of tantalizing
features not quite sharp enough to interpret. I'm left with
the impression of a surface with lots of varying contours.
Many of the smaller high contrast features seem to be
albedo-related, as if between light and dark materials,
perhaps at smaller "un-slumped" vents.
If anyone's interested, you can view this roughly enhanced
image at:
<http://www.bhil.com/~kelly/wild2.html>.
Sterling K. Webb
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Ron Baalke wrote:
I've added an animation of the Comet Wild 2 flyby
images taken by
Stardust to the Stardust website.
Included is a chart from the Dust Flux Instrument
showing
the particle impacts on the spacecraft during the
flyby, and
another chart showing the spacecraft thruster
activity:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/status/040106.html
You can view the animation directly from here:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/images/w2_flyby1.gif
Ron Baalke
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