SAR image of the Calumet region of Chicago

I've been working on manipulating the large images offered by the Sentinel satellite. I found an image of the city of Chicago region on April 10th, 2016, and have been taking a look at it. The data image is 25000x16000. I grabbed the HH(the Horizontal transmitted, horizontal received polarization) and HV images (horizontally transmitted, returned vertical polarization), normalized them and made them R and B in an RGB set. The G I created by adding the two images together. Adjusting the hue allows for greater visual impact of the image. This is the Calumet region of southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana, a heavily industrialized region. Lake Calumet, Lake Michigan, Wolf Lake, and the Calumet River/Cal Sag all show with no reflectivity at this normalization (you'll recall the previous post where Lake Geneva had some return from waves). The ArcelorMittal steelworks sits out on the right as a highly reflective region of pipes, stacks, rail cars and other industrialness, with the BP Whiting refinery to the left of it as another nearly continuous return. Long linear blue streaks are presumed oil or ethanol conveys consisting of mile-long packs of tanker cars that are bright in the HV channel. Shipping containers, barges, oil tanks and rail cars that are not tankers all reflect highly in the HH return. Even Binions Horseshoe floating casino shows up brightly. A bright return in the upper left I assume is the tower at Promet steel.

Saturn visible behind Lutetia during flyby

Hey, this is pretty cool; I'm always a fan of planetary conjunctions.

Saturn was visible in a few of the images of Lutetia taken by Rosetta as it passed by!

Fly-by of Lutetia is a success

Another successful asteroid fly-by!
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002577/

Crescent Earth

The Earth captured from the Rosetta spacecraft as it passed by Earth.
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ESA. Taken on 11/12/2009. Click to enlarge.
As seen on the Planetary Society blog.

What is going on with the Herschel and Planck missions?

The European Space Agency launched an ambitious set of satellites a few days ago: Herschel is a 3.5m diameter infrared telescope, and Planck is a cosmic microwave background telescope. Both are planned to be placed in one of Earth's Lagrangian points called L2. Upon launch such large objects can be tracked with optical telescope for a while. Upon examining these images, astronomers found not two objects, but at first four, which turned out to be the booster rocket and the structure holding both satellite while launching (see here). But later, they found two more fainter objects. These objects have seemingly moved off of the Herschel/Planck trajectory. What were they? The other more disturbing news came today, when Jean-Claude Pelle of Southern Stars Observatories reported finding dozens of new objects in the same path. This implies a possible failure of one or more of the telescopes and would be a blow to science.