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."

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Corale Cache everyone!!! MESSENGER Flyby [nyud.net]

And as always... Slashdotted into Oblivion.

[wschalle]

Here's the cache. Movie [nyud.net]

Mirror

[dr_d_19]

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 [nyud.net].

un /.'ed version

[smoondog]

Can be found here [nasa.gov]

-Sean (OutdoorDB [outdoordb.org] - The Outdoor Wiki

BitTorrent!

[mwilliamson]

I just set up a torrent.

http://puffin.tamucc.edu/~mwilliamson/torrents/mdi s_depart.mpeg.mpa.mpg.torrent [tamucc.edu]

Re:Slashdotted already?

[glesga_kiss]

already the site seems to be slashdotted

I just pulled the mpeg in at 600k/s, not bad for a 5 meg file on the front page of Slashdot.

Cool video. It's a keeper. Just gotta keep reminding yourself that it's real, not SFX.

Re:Impressive!

[stupid_is]

From TFA:

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.

Stop whining, use greasemonkey

[eqisow]

Greasemonkey [mozilla.org]
Script [dunck.us] to auto add mirrordot and coralcache links to stories.

Seriously, stop whining and take matters into your own hands.

Re:Interesting

[BenJeremy]

The "hotspot" is from the oceans. Pay attention and you'll see, toward the very end of the clip, that the land mass glides through the edge of the hot spot.

Also, while most cloud formations are not in the light long enough to see real change, one formation does appear to dissipate before hitting the terminator.

This appears to be quite real.

Re:maybe you're rtight? is this fake?

[MidnightBrewer]

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.

Re:collision 27th frame from end

[Ariane 6]

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.

Background info on this video

[Rocketguy2]

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.

Wrong aspect ratio with mplayer

[YA_Python_dev]

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.

Re:Well, the Earth is here, but...

[Mechcozmo]

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.

Re:Underwhelmed

[ashitaka]

Much misinformation here and in other replies.

1) The Voyager probes were launched 9 years after 2001 came out.

2) Kubrick wasn't happy with the look of the effects of Saturn produced by Doug Trumbell so the destination was switched to Jupiter.

3) Doug got better at producing Saturn imagery and used it in "Silent Running".