The Courier spacecraft took the first portrait of our solar system from the inside out, and this 34-image image complements the 1990 Voyager 1 portrait of the solar system. Obtaining a photographic portrait is a remarkable feat for the Messenger team, said Shaun Solomon, chief investigator at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., texted.
This snapshot of our proximity also reminds us that Earth is a member of a family of planets formed by a common process four and a half billion years ago. Our spacecraft will soon orbit the last member of the family, who has many new answers about how cumulative stars are assembled and evolved.
Messenger's wide-angle camera (WA C) captured images on November 3 and 16, 2010. In mosaics, all the planets are visible except Uranus and Neptune, and their distances are 3.0 and 4.4 billion kilometers, respectively, too faint to detect. Earth's Moon and Jupiter's Galilean moons. (callisto, ganymede, europa, and lo) can be seen in the NAC image. The solar system's perch on the spiral walls of the Milky Way also provides a beautiful view of parts of the galaxy at the center of the bottom of the new system.
The curved shape of the mosaic is due to the fact that Messenger's orbit is tilted toward the ecliptic, which is the orbit of Earth and most planets, which means the camera must point up to see some planets and then look down at others.
Explains brett Denevi, member of the Messnger Imaging Team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
The images are stretched to make it easier to detect planets, although this part of the image also highlights the light from the stars' limbs and, in some cases, produces artifacts, such as the non-spherical shapes of some planets.
Assembling the portrait was not an easy task, Solomon said. "From this perspective, it's not easy to find many planets in a single moment of tears, and our ability to present in certain directions is limited by the strong sun's direction."
Hong Kang of APL, who came to the guidance and control team of the Self-Confidence Mission, used the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Solar System Simulator to determine the relative positions of the Messenger and the planet to determine whether the planet could be seen from the Messenger at any given time.
"Then we credited the celestial coordinates of the planets, and at the time I wanted to observe them and verify through simulations that messsnger could see every planet." Kang explains, "We also used a satellite kit to validate the planets in our field of view using the Mercury Dual Imaging System in action. ”
The messenger team must then determine the required exposure time for each planet.
"From the exposure times of previously photographed stars, we chose the exposure time, allowing us to get an appropriate number of counts (i.e., light years) in each planet image"
Mission operations leadership and instrument classifier mdis.
We decided to proofread the camera and the wide-angle camera to take images of each star so that we could cover the sky around the planet and photograph the planet itself at as high resolution as possible.
We took all these parameters and various related settings and started using the mdis command sequence, which we had to configure and control the camera system.
Robin Vaughan worked with Kang to coordinate the direction and timing of the MDIS, and he also played an important role in the acquisition of traveler portraits.
"I was at JPL as an optical navigation analyst for the Nautical Neptune encounter. I had to plan and generate pointing commands for the background star images of Neptune and its moons, which we used to refine, and we estimated the trajectory of the spacecraft before the Neptune encounter. Vaughn, principal engineer of the APL Messenger Navigation and Control (Attitude Control) subsystem, said.
The voyager's portrait of the solar system was done a few years after that flyby, and the imaging team coordinated our optical navigation image planning software to be used to repeatedly examine their pointing commands and give them what to expect to see in each image.
Vaughn also used Kang's design to test the Messenger's portrait.
"I used messenger's navigation team, the Twin Cities Navigator spice trajectory file, as well as the tool-wrapped routines, to write a software program that, taking into account the constraints of the spacecraft's attitude pivot angle and sun-holding region, to identify the window when there are planets visible in mdis," she said. ”
From a technical point of view, the portrait of the surname number is a little more complicated than the traveler, because we have to stay under the constraints of the sun.
So far, since travelers are outside the solar system, the sun is much weaker, and as far as the sun is concerned, there is no limit to the overall attitude of the spacecraft. Vaughn said.
Inside the solar system, The Messenger must constantly keep shade points pointing toward the Sun, which limits the time it takes to observe different planets, even though MDIS has extra degrees of freedom thanks to its pivotal capabilities.
Denevi said the experiment was told in a humble way. "Seeing our solar system as these little points of light reminds you of how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to explore up close the incredible diversity and geology that each planet and moon exhibits," she said. Mercury has had only a small dot on the horizon for most of its history, but we can fill in the details and know that he is a real world. What an amazing opportunity this is. ”
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