How come NASA won't release the satellite photos of other planets?

Originally posted by johnlear

Thanks for the information PhloydPhan but what you have stated is merely NAZA's take. We will never really know because most of us will never travel there.

I must take issue with that John. If you care to make observations of planets like Jupiter and Saturn, you will see vast storms on the surface. If you time when these are on the Central Meridian of the planet, you will notice that over a period of time they appear to drift in longitude, thus they cannot be fixed structures. We can learn a lot about the gas giants without being there. You can do it from your own garden!

More over, we can 'weigh' Jupiter by the gravitational effects on it's moons and our own spacecraft which have visited it. If Jupiter were solid rock, it would be much heavier.

Cassini-Huygens Enceladus fly-by at an altitude of 30 miles is due March 12th... from JPL yesterday,

"The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on Tuesday, February 26, from the Goldstone tracking complex. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally."

Because Saturn is in opposition in about 3 days and change, Saturn viewing from our 3rd Rock' should be very, very good. Likely some slugs and features on NASA-TV.

NASA has some features on the Enceladus flyby released yesterday... here's a short YouTube... "Taking The Plunge - Cassini at Enceladus". I rather enjoyed it. Couple other bits of new data at the homepage listed in an above-post... for those with an interest. The "where is the spacecraft now" feature was kinda cool.



and the NASA HD-Video of the same at 1280 res that opens in Quicktime. Tons of HD popping up... I bet there's some "sweet" stock in the archives from the advent of newer cams over the years. LOL. Likely everything that IG doesn't... "you know".

NASA's Planetary Data System is "up" and sort of "works"... mega-clumsy by design maybe. Not unusable but one must adapt to it's system and "searchiness". It'll improve. Better than the old hodge-podge of spots... but I knew the old hodge-podge. Drat. Times change, so has NASA's web footprint. Everytime or almost everytime I go to look for data, even "not-so-old" stuff, it's either gone or at the end of some advanced searching. You never have to hide what you can't find. Thank the deities that the old Clementine data was still there. Hahahaha. Oops, it could "disappear" too.

This fly-by is so "thread the needle" it's awesome. Quite the event despite how "ho-hum" it is portrayed as. STS-123 will have center stage that day I'd expect.

Cheers,

Vic

[edit on 5-3-2008 by V Kaminski]

Originally posted by johnlear
Originally posted by PhloydPhan

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune: These planets are gas giants - they are essentially nothing but atmosphere, with no notable "surface" to map.

Thanks for the information PhloydPhan but what you have stated is merely NAZA's take. We will never really know because most of us will never travel there. And there is no reason to suspect that NAZA has told the truth about any of their missions.

In any case I thought that the only "Gas Giant" in our solar system was NAZA itself. Thanks for the alternate opinion.

At least with jupiter the average amateur astronomer can prove "nasa's take". As Jupiter rotates, horizontal bands of clouds adjacent to each other move at different speeds. Certain bands move eastward while at the same time adjacent bands move directly westward. It's like a set of ball bearings rolling over each other. That kind of character is unique to big balls of gas, like jupiter, or like the sun. This is confirmed by amateur observations, not just "Naza" as you like to call it.

www.iceinspace.com.au...

You can actually see the white oval storms in the lower belts moving slightly opposite the rotation of the planet while other storms are simultaneously moving slightly faster than the rotation of the planet. This was taken by an amateur in australia, not america, and not nasa:
www.iceinspace.com.au...