In centuries past, explorers would visit terra incognita — unknown lands — and bring new information back home to feed the master mappers of Europe. It hasn’t changed all that much — except the explorers are robot spacecraft and the master mappers of the solar system are scientists.
Late Tuesday afternoon, I saw a NASA press release about one of NASA’s master mappers, Robert Gaskell. He’s a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and a participating scientist in the MESSENGER mission to Mercury.
His newest project will create super-detailed maps of Mercury’s surface based on images sent back by MESSENGER after its January flyby. This piqued my interest. I could write a little news piece for the web site and the next print issue, but — and this is the big but of all news writing — can I get a cool image to go with it? I sent him an e-mail and went home.
Wednesday morning I received his response: "I'll try to get you something. I should stress that these maps are very preliminary since they only have one sun direction and the techniques I use work best if there are several illumination directions."
Scientists don’t like to release data before it’s ready. After all, when he is done, his Mercury maps will be THE maps of that planet. Scientists will use these maps to study the planet. They will be published in magazines and on web sites all over the world.
This is one of the most fun parts of this job. Day to day, we slog through our deadlines, and it’s not always a party around here. It’s stressful.
But then something comes across my radar screen, and because of my association with the magazine, I get to just ping somebody out there and they actually respond! The access is the fun part — an intellectual treasure hunt.
If and when I get some of Gaskell’s new Mercury mapping, I’ll share it with you. In the meantime, check out these two high-resolution animations of the asteroids Eros and Itokawa. Gaskell created them from spacecraft flyby data. In fact, he wrote the software to make the animations himself. You can download the QuickTime files directly from his iDisk site. We're currently converting the files, also, and we'll post the non-QuickTime versions as soon as we can.
Gaskell's iDisk also offers a massive 474 Mb file (MAPMAKER.tar) that contains a database and software for making your own maps of any area on Eros you want to about 5-meter resolution. Any amateur solar system mappers out there? Let us know how you do. Keep in mind that even with a high-speed connection, you’ll have to wait quite a while to download the .tar file.