Earth Departure Movie From MESSENGER Spacecraft 193
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."
Ummm (Score:1)
Sad to say I've never even heard of the MESSENGER spacecraft before today.
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
It's not news, it's fark... oh wrong site.
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdotted already? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Slashdotted already? (Score:2)
Re:Slashdotted already? (Score:2)
And as always... Slashdotted into Oblivion. (Score:5, Informative)
Mirror (Score:2, Informative)
Beautiful.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ob. DNA - How to Leave the Planet (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Ob. DNA - How to Leave the Planet (Score:2)
Re:Ob. DNA - How to Leave the Planet (Score:2)
Re:Ob. DNA - How to Leave the Planet (Score:2)
Re:Beautiful.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Beautiful.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't help but think of a short essay written by Carl Sagan after he saw an image of the Earth [planetary.org] taken by Voyager. It's spine-tingling stuff:
'Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and c
Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
The very fact that you can see an illuminated portion of a sphere indicates that, if the sphere is sufficiently reflective, you will see a reflection of the light source. The only way
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Sure, I'll correct you. That reflection is the Sun. You can prove it to yourself. Draw a circle on a piect of paper to represent the Earth. Draw a bunch of parallel lines that represent sunlight heading towards your cicrular earth and when they hit the edge, reflect them off at the same angle they hit (We're pretending the Earth is a spherical mirror here). Note that, from the angle of the spaceship, you'll get a bright "hot spot" about where
Check the weather (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, because I didn't know that the sun made such a "hotspot" reflection on the earth. Interesting. All the other pictures I've seen from outer space of the earth make it look less "plastic".
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
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:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:maybe you're rtight? is this fake? (Score:5, Informative)
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:maybe you're rtight? is this fake? (Score:2)
Re:maybe you're rtight? is this fake? (Score:2)
un /.'ed version (Score:5, Informative)
-Sean (OutdoorDB [outdoordb.org] - The Outdoor Wiki
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't appear to be any stars or moon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Breathtaking video though. Very cool.
Re:Doesn't appear to be any stars or moon? (Score:2)
Impressive! (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Impressive! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Impressive! (Score:2, Funny)
They forgot to make the clouds move.
Re:Impressive! (Score:2)
There's a movie on MST3K that showed an OLD Universal logo without any clouds. Crow said "It's the best weather Earth has ever had!"
BitTorrent! (Score:4, Informative)
http://puffin.tamucc.edu/~mwilliamson/torrents/mdi s_depart.mpeg.mpa.mpg.torrent [tamucc.edu]
I'd love to oblige (Score:2, Funny)
Either that or they have a running king-of-the-hill contest on who can slashdot a site the fastest.
No sound?!? (Score:5, Funny)
1. A swooshy spaceship noice
or
2. The opening bars of the Star Trek: TNG theme tune
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No sound?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Underwhelmed (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention... (Score:2)
It always does. (Score:2)
Re:Underwhelmed (Score:2)
Interesting choice of movie examples. They actually changed the visual effects to more resemble the Voyager footage that was just coming in at the time. In fact, the Voyager probes are why the Discovery when to Jupiter instead of Saturn (like they did in the book).
Re:Underwhelmed (Score:3, Informative)
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".
BitTorrent (Score:2)
mdis_depart.mpeg.torrent [hedges.net]
Reverse It (Score:2)
Re:Reverse It (Score:3, Funny)
AviSynth (Score:2)
a=DirectShowSource("mdis_depart.mpeg", fps=25,seek=true,audio=false)
return Reverse(a)
Manual method (Score:2)
What would I learn doing that? (Score:2)
Re:Reverse It (Score:2)
Re:Reverse It (Score:2)
Re:Reverse It (Score:2)
Or you could just use quicktime to play it forwards/backwards at will.
Re:Reverse It (Score:2)
Especially the East African lakes glistening in the sun at around 7 seconds.
collision 27th frame from end (Score:5, Interesting)
most spectacular is the flash 27 frames from the end. looks like it could be lightning or a large meteor.
Re:collision 27th frame from end (Score:4, Funny)
Re:collision 27th frame from end (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:collision 27th frame from end (Score:2)
Re:collision 27th frame from end (Score:5, Interesting)
Phase = 0 --> highlight is directly below you
Phase = 90 --> highlight is halfway between nadir and the western limb
As phase tends to180 --> highlight disappears over the western limb.
Re:collision 27th frame from end (Score:2)
neat (Score:2)
Good for the industry (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Stop whining, use greasemonkey (Score:2, Informative)
Script [dunck.us] to auto add mirrordot and coralcache links to stories.
Seriously, stop whining and take matters into your own hands.
Re:Stop whining, use greasemonkey (Score:2)
Also the graphics are pretty damn aweful.
What is there to see? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 t
Re:What is there to see? (Score:2)
Now that you mention it, yes. It's definitely heading clockwise away from Earth. The Earth's phase indicates that it's also headed slightly radially outward from the sun. Odd.
A few days ago my intro to planetary prof. was telling us how it was thought for quite some time that getting an orbiter to Mercury (as opposed to flyby
Re:What is there to see? (Score:2)
(bangs head against the wall in frustration)
Looks like that Orbiter simulator (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Question! (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] diagram of messenger's orbit from the article [wikipedia.org] 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?
Re:Question! (Score:5, Interesting)
as an object drops into a lower orbit they orbit in fewer seconds. Venus goes around the sun in fewer days than earth does, as does mercury...
HOWEVER, the linear velocity of an inner orbit is slower than the linear velocity of an outer orbit.
So, to go in, you slow down. Which results in dropping to a lower orbit, which results in your pulling out "in front" of the object you're seperating from leaving it both "above" you and "behind" you.
So, accelerating spinwise is out, and slower.
Accelerating anti-spinwise is in, and faster
let us not get into what happens when you accelerate OUT or IN....
Re:Question! (Score:2)
Actually, the linear velocity for an inner orbit is faster than for an outer orbit, on average. Earth is going 30 km/s around the Sun, while Mercury varies between 39 km/s (at its farthest to the Sun) and 59 km/s (at its closest).
However, if a probe similar to Messenger were in an orbit that gets as far out as Earth, and as close in as Mercury, then it would be going much slower than Earth at Earth's distanc
Re:Question! (Score:2)
window reflection (Score:2)
That artifact in the middle of the earth that
looks like the reflection of a window. Is that
supposed to be the sun? It looks more like a window to me. I can even see someone looking in.
occlusion (Score:3, Funny)
Re:occlusion (Score:2)
Obvious hoax (Score:2)
I do think it's amazing how quickly it's moving though; the visible weather patterns shown don't really change much...
What no stars?? Its obviously a fake! (Score:2)
in the arizona desert where they faked the moon
landings too. How stupid do they think we are?
Everyone knows the earth is flat and was made in 7 days anyway. Pah, spacecraft my holy ass!
Background info on this video (Score:5, Informative)
More info at NASA... (Score:2)
MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission.
No wonder space research costs so much - it isn't easy to come up with these names!
Re:More info at NASA... (Score:2)
Why do government agencies feel the need to "retronym" every project name into an acronym? The name is obviously derived from its association with the mythological Mercury, messenger of the gods. Then, probably some mid level management PHB comes along and says "let's put a team together to turn that into an acronym". Apollo didn't need to be an acronym. Nor Voyager. Nor Pioneer. These childish acronyms are ridiculous. Have some digity
Re:More info at NASA... (Score:3)
Not to mention composre and decorm!
Re:More info at NASA... (Score:3)
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"....
Re:More info at NASA... (Score:2)
Wrong aspect ratio with mplayer (Score:3, Informative)
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.
OMG this is fake! (Score:4, Funny)
More Serene at Slower Speed (Score:2)
Only flyby movie ever taken (Score:3, Interesting)
Timestamps. (Score:2)
I deduce that the images were timestamped on the spaceship: The 3 millisecond longer speed-of-light delay for successive images to reach earth would have been very measurable.
Re:Well, the Earth is here, but... (Score:2)
Re:Well, the Earth is here, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:real pictures or not (Score:2)
Re:real pictures or not (Score:2)
You basically have two choices, when presented with super bright object(s), and other much less bright object(s):
1. Expose the bright object(s) perfectly, leaving the other object(s) unseen because they are underexposed.
2. Expose the less bright object(s) perfectly, leaving the very bright object(s) overexposed and thus, completely unintelligible. (A giant bright ugly blob)
Well, I suppose you can also go for some exposure in
Re:Slashdot Slashdot. (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot Slashdot. (Score:2)