Poor Vision at NASA
Remember the Hubble Space Telescope and how the primary lens was made wrong -- they had to fly up a set of special corrective optics to fix it because the manufacturer screwed up?
Something like that couldn't ever happen again now could it?
Guess what -- from
Yahoo/Space
Deep Impact Team Solves Blurry Photo Problem
The scientists behind NASA's Deep Impact mission said Thursday they hope to fix the spacecraft's blurry vision by using a mathematical process on the images it captures after they have been transmitted to Earth.
The announcement was made at a press briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington, during which the Deep Impact team discussed the special fireworks show the mission will is expected to produce on July 4th.
The spacecraft was launched in early January aboard a Delta II rocket, and is scheduled to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 early next month. Twenty-four hours before contact, the spacecraft's two main parts—Flyby and Impactor—will separate and take part in a very carefully orchestrated hit-and-run.
However in March it was discovered that the Flyby spacecraft's High Resolution Instrument (HRI) was not focusing properly. The team will use a process, called deconvolution, to remedy the situation. Deconvolution is widely used in image processing and involves the reversal of the distortion created by the faulty lens of a camera or other optical devices, like a telescope or microscope.
"The process is a purely mathematical manipulation that works extremely well," said Don Yoemans, a co-investigator for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is managing the mission for NASA.
"Even if you have a perfect telescope, which is limited by diffraction, you can use deconvolution to improve the resolution" Yoeman said. "The process is sometimes time consuming, so the biggest effect on the science is a delay while you do all the processing to get the quality that you expected."
'Scuse me for asking the obvious but doesn't the National Arrows and Spears Administration ever
CHECK these things prior to being put on the rocket and launched? They must have enough rocket scientists there who could run a few simple optical tests in one of their large space-vacuum simulators.
Buncha maroons!
And yes, Deconvolution works very well for gaining resolution -- I do a lot of photography and use this tool from time to time. Only problem is that it can introduce artifacts so if you do not know what the original source looks like, it is not the best tool in the shed to be using unless there is no other hope. (ie: The optics are that much out of focus.)
Posted by DaveH at June 9, 2005 11:06 PM