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And before that were the good old days of "maybe we'll get it up this time".
When I started college at Florida Institute of Technology in the fall of 1966 we had an orientation evening that took place in the "quad" (a grassy area between the five small one story classroom buildings that comprised the original instructional campus area back then) where a movie screen and film projecter (how quaint) had been set up to show the NASA rocket failure "outtakes" film. It was about 15 minutes of one rocket after another blowing up in the most interesting and entertaining ways. Afterwards the head of the department talked for a few minutes and started out saying "you're here to learn now not to repeat these mistakes". FIT was the first college to have a degree program in "Space Technology". Many of our professors worked at the Space Center during the day and taught courses at FIT during the night.
Now I think this can be stretched onto a primitive sphere, tho It's not complete. That may require something far more ambushes then the Messenger craft getting into orbit around Mercury.
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-map-of-pluto-the-whale-and-the-donut
I miss the old red lines, and the copy-n-past thing I could take text elsewhere, to Gramer check it. I had a thought before I started typing this, where did it go. Ah, need coffee.
Coffee in brain, err, in cup in hand, on it's way to the brain. Charon map? I know, in due time. As for a BBC show (Voyage to the planets), it was clamed that Charon is always stuck in the same spot in Pluto's sky. And Tidally locked akin to our moon. So theoretically one only needs a map of one side of charon, to do renders of stuff on Pluto.
P.S. I look at the heart and Whale, and instantly think, Geology, Pluto has Geology (it's not just a featureless rock). Charon on the otherhand, in the one image (on the left), looks remarkably like Earth's moon, Magnificant deselation.
To be fair, one of the things they wanted to find out for the early Ranger missions was "can we aim a spaceship accurately enough so we can reliably hit the Moon?" After that, it was just a matter of refinement and doing it over and over again until they could hit the exact spot above the Moon to go into orbit. Baby steps; when you know absolutely nothing about a completely new subject, it's the safest and most reliable way to make progress. As a result, the last few Apollo missions switched to manual control for landing within a few hundred yards of their planned spots.
LeatherGryphon, lucky. I had to go-it alone. preschool in Augsberg, than dumped into 4th grade in the states, and tossed in the corner of the class to stair at the ceiling essentially, lol. So in any case, rockets, well, I studied them on my own, tho I was never 'there' when it happened. There are some incredible documentaries, tho they will never replace having 'been there'. ("when we left earth", "Failure Is Not An Option" - A Flight Control History of NASA", etc)
I am aware how difficult it is to get into orbit around Mercury (because of the sun's gravity, and the approach velocity involved with getting there). Pluto is far worse in a similar way. Both have a very high approach velocity, both have no atmosphere to Aerobrake in, and the weight of the needed fuel to perform an Orbit-injection burn is prohibitive to say the least. lol.
(EDIT) hello SpottedKitty. Just from a humor point of view, it's funny. A fly-by atleast gives you a working craft after the encounter, to transmit back data from the encounter. Tho yes, it was far more fundimential back when Ranger was hapening, and it was not all success. An equivelent, missed the moon, and was renamed "Mechta" (the dream).
Only three days to go. Yea! I hope we get another picture today.
Only two days to go. Yea!
Looken good to.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150710-2
Yeah +1 what a historic moment can't wait
Pluto has features! OMG :) Whole life I only envisioned it flat for whatever reason
Oh, I see it! Very interesting geology.
Who would expect that ! a big surprise after so many years ! I wonder how so small dwarf planet keep 5 mons in the orbit ... does the core is still active ? with geology like that it may be ? just wondering
I knew there was a dog up there! I knew it!
I'm enjoying the images that have been coming through.
The core is probaby dead but the supercold ices under the surface probably warm slightly when Pluto is nearest the sun (it makes quite a change in distance during its orbit, sometimes closer than Neptune) and the expanding gases from the ices (methane, nitrogen, etc) probably cause surface fractures and quakes and volcanoes, and blowouts, and collapses, and plateau lifting, etc. Neptune's moon Triton is probably a model for what Pluto is.
Almost any body more than a few hundred tons can capture a satellite if you wait long enough for one of just the right size, speed and direction to come to just the right spot in space. A few billion years usually works. There are asteroids with their own moon.
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/asteroid-that-flew-past-earth-today-has-moon
Interesting, Thanks ! @LeatherGryphon
For grand and long term thinkers: "In Eternity, anything that is not forbidden, is inevitable."
I did a little fussing around today. I did this mostly for the curiosity of seeing it in studio.
On the left is Pluto, right is Mercury. For Pluto, I simply cropped down the one map from a few days ago, and tossed it on a sphere. The Mercury approximation is using many more maps (Diffuse, Spec, and Displacement), from a craft that's been in orbit taking pictures of the surface for a few years to build up the mosaics.
Both started as 1ft spheres. I then set the scale of Mercury to 151.6%, and Pluto to 73.6%, to get them close to scale.
It's been a long day, chat later.
From the Messenger data? Where did you find them — I've been looking for actual planetary maps, the new NASA site is implausible, if not impossible, to navigate, and the stuff in Celestia sometimes isn't suitable for plopping directly on a D|S sphere.
To be honest, these maps are not either, tho, it's a start. The smallest maps there (2.5km/pixel)are still a tad large for DS, and there are areas that appear to be 'off' a bit. (Example Plowed-out-rectangular-plane looking to the north of Caloris Planitia). That and the maps are in 'Day-light-shading' not Displacement-shading, so some things are way off up close, lol.
Nasa's site can be good, tho sometimes it's focused more to 'the public' and school kids, that just want quick short highlights of something and not much 'boring details'. Just tell me the important bits, and move on to the next exciting thing. So no, the data came from elsewhere entirely. I started at the JPL site for them.
The 1.88GB compressed PNG files are WAY to Much!!! Get the smaller ones.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/mosaics.html
Oh, and yes, I did modify them before just slapping them on the sphere. And they need allot more work.
so much for a quick reply, let me get some coffee and type this up. The **** copy-n-paste is still broken, and I cant spell.
(EDIT) and here is Mercury after a tad more work on the maps in Gimp. Replaced black with gray on the "8-color" mosaic, and put that in the Diffuse. The softened day-light maps was moved down to Specular Color, and the other maps still need work.
I just noticed the HDEM maps, lol. Let me try them
. Forget that, nothing there that studio, Gimp, or Irfanview can comprehend.
Pluto Time! I thought Pluto was completely dark to us mere humans, I was wrong. Pluto gets enough light to read a book :). For example right before sunset and right before sunrise Earth has about as much light as Pluto has during noon.
At the bottom of the link below there is a tool where you can input your location and it will tell you the next time your location will have sunlight equivlent to Pluto's noon. For me in the SE US, it will be 8:54 tonight.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/
Not sure if this was shared yet, if so I missed it so worth a repost.
Faster than DAZ now. I have had a life-long interest in what's out there and can hardly wait to see more of the fly-by. My son and I kept running between the TV and the yard when we landed on the moon. Something neither of us ever forget.
You have a TV and a yard on the moon ?
You so lucky .. I wish I was on the moon too with my daughter
Modelled this one for the occasion.. not long to go
Carrara 8.5Pro, Ron's Space Brushes & Starry skies for Carrara :-)
...nice.
Wonga, that is cool. I had thought about making a 3D duplicate of the craft in studio, and decided I was not good enough to replicate all of that crinkled surface (PET film). to much time and effort, lol.
kyoto kid, hello. You just dropping by to teas us all with that cute curly dynamic hair style that will never work in Studio quite like that, aren't ya, lol. That is a good gif, I like it.
...nah, been into astronomy since grade school. Looking forward to seeing the first "close up" images
As to the hair, wish I had the hardware to support it, the software to generate it, and and the hair dynamics engine to animate it. Sadly it would take matching 6 of 6 on the Megabucks Lotto to afford it all as I don't think Pixar's about to give that away for free.
...this is about the best I can do for now.
kyoto kid, I was not implying that anyone was not welcome here, lol. It was just a simple hello.
As for that hair, I vaguely remember in a documentary somewhere. The artist was showing the bit with the bear roaring, and the artist had to go in and adjust a few individual strands frame-to-frame, just to give it that extra bit of 'Life'. It's that same kind of fine-adjustment that would be needed to make a PET-film wrapped craft look good or not. The wrinkles behave differently at corners and on curves, then they do on flat surfaces. And simply trying to do that much displacement amplitude with a map, would cause tearing on the corners. Here is a good example of that wrinkle behavior on SOHO, with all those different shapes. (err, if it attached. no error, tho that broken image icon doesn't look good... There we go.)
(EDIT) OK, no way to copy the original file name text, grrrr... Ah where was I. "PW", as in that was done post work, rather then posing/morphing it in Studio/Carara? That looks realy good.
...no offence taken.
Yeah, looks like the image didn't attach correctly (have that happen myself) . Sometimes you have to give it a couple tries for it to work (remember to delete the bad file though)
https://instagram.com/p/5HTXKMoaFL/
With Love ..Pluto