Yeah, ESA is on the right track here and the data (e.g. we do image segmentation on S2 data) is great. However handling the data is non-trivial, as e.g. Sentinel-2 (an earth observation satellite for land cover mapping) generates 1TB data per day (AFAIK).

It is hosted and mirrored by different sites and companies, in particular GCE and AWS.

Where is the Sentinel-2 data hosted on GCE and AWS?

You can try http://sentinel-pds.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/

This is great!

I'm working on a space simulation project and I've been looking for imagery from space probes (e.g. New Horizons' Pluto and Charon imagery, Dawn's shots of Ceres and MESSENGER's new Mercury images). It is surprisingly difficult to find this data.

What I can find is some textures that have already been processed to a normal 2:1 rectangular image. But this projection is suboptimal for rendering planetary images, as there is distortion around the poles.

What I would like to find is some larger data set which could be processed into cube maps that would have better area distortion characteristics. But this is difficult, either the data is not publicly available at all or it's "too raw" to be used without a lot of processing.

I know that these data sets exist - we see nice renderings from the space craft's imagery all the time - it's just not available to the general public easily.

If anyone knows where I could find good quality images from planetary probes (I'm mostly interested in visible light images and topography - ie. height maps), let me know!

For NASA image data, you can go to the PDS: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html The Atlas has access to the mission released data. There is also link to PILOT, which has quick access to MESSENGER data and some Dawn data. New Horizons will be added soon.

Although there is a learning curve to processing and projecting raw imagery (using ISIS), it's gotten simpler. You can now use gdal to generate images.

For ESA missions you generally have to contact the Principal Investigator or PR team of the organisation sponsoring the instrument.

There have been examples when ESA itself wasn't granted access to the results of instrumemts on its own probes.

Theoretically they only have exclusivity for 6 to 12 months but few proactively release data after that time.

Yeah, this is what I figured. However, being a one man hobby project, I doubt I'll even get a foot between the door. Even finding the contact information for the different data sets would be next to impossible.

I have considered enrolling to a university just to get access to the library, data sets and journals as well as get in touch with professors and scientists that could help.

For New Horizons (and many others):

  http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/

Let me know if you need any help.

Have you looked at orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/)?

I know they have some high resolution maps for several planets .

Go to download->optional high-resolution texture download (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/mirrors/orbiter_radio/tex_mir...). I don't know the format so I could be mistaken but I think it also includes elevation maps.

I know Orbiter and I have been using textures from Celestia add-ons.

They are typically normal rectangular textures with the usual distortion.

Thanks for the pointer.

I found the data you speak of from Voyager I and II years ago. It included the raw frames which were full of dots from Vidicon tubes.

My guess is that New Horizons is still too new. I think scientists get exclusive access for a year or two.

You could always try a FOIA request to NASA. They are required to reply to those.

Talking about open access data: Are there good public sources of raw radio astronomy data?

There are several public archives for radio astronomy. Find your favourite telescope which allows public proposals for observations and search for archive. e.g. VLA: https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vla/archive/index ALMA: https://almascience.eso.org/alma-data