Has NASA's MESSENGER gone color blind?

BradGuth wrote:
"Has NASA's MESSENGER gone color blind?"
Apparently "Mercury's unseen side now seen!" is only available in
those colors of gray. After all this time, and of our hard earned
loot spent, I'm actually rather disappointed in NASA's MESSENGER. Are
we ever going to see the full visible spectrum scope and photographic
color depth and contrast worth of our digital images, or merely as
limited as to whatever gray pixels they see fit to share in B&W and of
such limited DR to boot?

The imagers on space probes are usually designed for scientific purposes
and not generating eye candy. This usually means a sensor with a colour
filter wheel. Creating colour images requires post processing which
isn't trivial --- with the probe moving you have to align the images for
each colour. The colour response is also often not well suited to
producing what our eyes would interpret as true colour. I think NASA has
admitted that this last aspect results in poor PR and that future
sensors might include more suitable filters in the set.

Note also that sci.op-research is about Operations Research and nothing
to do with optics.

Mark Thornton

Mark Thornton wrote:

The imagers on space probes are usually designed for scientific
purposes and not generating eye candy. This usually means a sensor
with a colour filter wheel. Creating colour images requires post
processing which isn't trivial --- with the probe moving you have to
align the images for each colour. The colour response is also often
not well suited to producing what our eyes would interpret as true
colour. I think NASA has admitted that this last aspect results in
poor PR and that future sensors might include more suitable filters in
the set.


In the case of MESSENGER, the photos are across a wide part of the
optical spectrum via several filters.
So they will be putting together color images of the planet from this
data fairly shortly.
The main point of the mission is to determine the elemental make-up of
the surface of Mercury by how the various minerals and rocks reflect
sunlight in various parts of the spectrum, via multiple images of the
same area through all of the optical filters This allows maps to be
generated, such as Clementine generated of the Moon using the same
technique. You can look at the Clementine lunar mineral maps he
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missio...entine/images/

Pat

The imagers on space probes are usually designed for scientific purposes
and not generating eye candy.

Don't discount "eye candy" for the public, aka taxpayers.

Anyway, in today's local paper I saw a "color" picture of Mercury. The
color may just have been photoshopped, as the entire planet was a light
tan hue.

robert casey wrote:


The imagers on space probes are usually designed for scientific
purposes and not generating eye candy.

Don't discount "eye candy" for the public, aka taxpayers.


The three-filter color approach movie to the planet was done
specifically for public consumption by NASA.
This is probably a frame from it:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...2&image_id=132

Pat

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:36:32 -0500, robert casey
wrote in :

The imagers on space probes are usually designed for scientific purposes
and not generating eye candy.

Don't discount "eye candy" for the public, aka taxpayers.

NASA doesn't -- see the websites and many images released to the public.

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)