Article: 5903 of comp.archives Path: i2unix!corton!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!trident.arc.nasa.gov!yee From: yee@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) Newsgroups: comp.archives Subject: [sci.space] Galileo images of Antarctica available Message-ID: Date: 10 Dec 91 08:33:41 GMT References: <1991Dec10.062415.811@news.arc.nasa.gov> Followup-To: sci.space Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Lines: 52 Approved: adam@soda.berkeley.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu X-Original-Newsgroups: sci.space X-Original-Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1991 06:24:15 GMT Archive-name: auto/sci.space/Galileo-images-of-Antarctica-available Jeffrey Moersch of Cornell has made several images taken during Galileo's 1990 Earth flyby available. His description follows. These images may be found in the SPACE archives on ames.arc.nasa.gov [128.102.18.3] and can be accessed via anonymous FTP in the pub/SPACE/GIF directory. I do not have software to combine the greyscale images into a single color image, but I would love to hear from anyone who does. -Peter Yee yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov ames!yee File: antar2.* This is a mosaic of 40 images (in red, green, and violet colors) of Antarctica taken by Galileo several hours after it flew close to the Earth on December 8, 1990. This is the first picture of the whole Antarctic continent taken nearly at once from space, as distinct from pictures pieced together from low orbit. Galileo was about 200,000 kilometers (125,000 miles) from Earth when the pictures were taken. Features as small as 3 miles across can be seen. The icy continent is surrounded by the dark blue of three oceans: the Pacific to the right, the Indian to the top, and a piece of the Atlantic to the lower left. Nearly the entire continent was sunlit at this time of year, just two weeks before southern summer solstice. The arc of dark spots extending from near the South Pole (close to the center) toward the upper right is the Transantarctic Mountain Range. To the right of the mountains is the vast Ross Ice Shelf and the shelf's sharp border with the dark waters of the Ross Sea. The thin blue line along the Earth's limb marks our planet's atmosphere. Launched in October 1989 and bound ultimately for Jupiter, Galileo received the first of its two gravity assists from its home planet on December 8, 1990, and is proceeding on toward the asteroid Gaspra. The mosaic is composed of three files, each an 8-bit VICAR image. To look at the mosaic on a 24-bit color display, place file antar2.red in the red channel, file antar2.grn in the green channel, and antar2.vio in the blue channel. File: ross.* This is a subset of the mosaic described above that shows only the area around the Ross Ice Shelf, Ross Island, and the Transantarctic Mountains. These images have been enhanced from the true color mosaic to bring out the contrast of the mountains and the blue of the glaciers. The largest glacier, seen in the left-center of the image, is the Beardmore Glacier. Ross Island and McMurdo Station are in the upper right corner. moersch@astrosun.TN.CORNELL.EDU