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Personally, I'll be happy when the ESA gets Darwin up ;)

However they do have grammatical errors right on this very page you gave us link to. :)

There's nothing wrong with taking another look at the situation. After all, O'Keefe wasn't exactly thorough in the analysis.

Personally, I'll be happy when the ESA gets Darwin up ;) Not only will it find terrestrial planets, but even be able to do spectral analyses on their atmospheres.

Cassiny/Huygens isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space, a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here.

Cassiny/Huygens isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space, a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here.

Cassiny/Huygens isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space, a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here.

Unfortunately the "author" doesn't provide a diff of the changes.

Hey Sven, I found a diff of the changes -- hope it helps. I would love to see a cleaned up version of this rolled into the GIMP as an option to help Photoshop users migrate.

Keep up the good work : )

At the moment, as far as I know, both the European ESA, with their ATV and the Russians, with their Progress do this same thing, i.e. autonomously meeting and docking with ships in orbit (the ISS mainly). Apart from that, I can't imagine that the technology is all that spectacular that NASA wasn't able to do this in the past. Or is this a case of NASA wasting money in trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?

Is there some aspect to this that really is new?

Really? Well goody, since the US is a net carbon sink we don't have anything to worry about here.

Carbon Sink

But what about Methane which is a much more potent greenhouse gas?

Methane

Looks like Europa is covered with snow at the moment. Remember to bring a snow shovel! :-)

Why shut it down when you could give it to someone else? I'm sure there is another country, company, or group who would be willing to take control of these space craft and gather data if NASA is now bored with the operation.

First find another organisation with the required antennas. I think Voyager II is far enough away to need 34 or 72 metre dishes. For twenty four hour coverage you'll need three spread across the globe. The good news is that networking them together should be cheaper now, than when NASA originally built the Deep Space Network. Then you'll need to equip and man those groundstations.

FWIW, the European Space Agency has one 34 metre dish at New Norcia with another being built at Cebreros near Madrid.

Why shut it down when you could give it to someone else? I'm sure there is another country, company, or group who would be willing to take control of these space craft and gather data if NASA is now bored with the operation.

First find another organisation with the required antennas. I think Voyager II is far enough away to need 34 or 72 metre dishes. For twenty four hour coverage you'll need three spread across the globe. The good news is that networking them together should be cheaper now, than when NASA originally built the Deep Space Network. Then you'll need to equip and man those groundstations.

FWIW, the European Space Agency has one 34 metre dish at New Norcia with another being built at Cebreros near Madrid.

... in Japan, China, and possibly openings soon in the European Union and India...

It was mentionned in the more technical articles, but unfortunately I can't find back the links right now. It is mentionned on esa website (look at the bottom of Feb. 15). The press did not put much emphasis on the failure of that particular experiment either. There were pictures! Everything must have worked!

I suppose they wanted to make sure that the experiment would really be salvaged before announcing it.

OK, the EULA is probably not permitting it to be used for mission critical solutions either, but in my opinion it's one of the better commercially available OS:es. (There's even a hobbyist license available). (anybody knowing of an OS that has an EULA that actually claims that the OS is intended for mission critical use?)

I think it's about time to require that software companies are responsible for their code. There are too many simple bugs passed through every day that would have been caught if a thorough software testing was done. One tool for doing it is Purify Plus, and another is Splint.

Splint is available to the public, unfortunately it's only checking C and not C++. (anyone in the mood for implementing a C++ version?)

And not even NASA and ESA software are always bug-free, but their software is as close as you can come to mission critical applications. I wouldn't like to have a computer running Windows on a mission to Mars, it isn't stable enough.

You will most certainly find this of interest!

Scientists have also recovered much data from Huygens that had been thought lost due to a communications failure...

Scientists revealed that missing data could be recovered via a network of radio telescopes that listened for Huygens' signals as it plunged through Titan's atmosphere and settled on the surface on 14 January.

So far neither ESA nor NASA/JPL have anything to say about this, but I would assume this information came from the press conference that was scheduled for today.

• Geological evidence for precipitation, erosion, mechanical abrasion and other fluvial activity says that the physical processes shaping Titan are much the same as those shaping Earth
• Huygens' data provide strong evidence for liquids flowing on Titan. However, the fluid involved is methane.
• ... while many of Earth's familiar geophysical processes occur on Titan, the chemistry involved is quite different. Instead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice ...

Yeah, except this ocean is super-cooled liquid methane. http://www.esa.int/export/esaKIDSen/SEMEI6WJD1E_Ou rUniverse_0.html

Famous last words: "Come on in, the water's just fine!"

Except these people don't. From this page:

While Huygens rests frozen at -180 degrees Celsius on Titan's landscape, a symbolic finale to the engineering and flight phase of this historic mission, scientists have taken little time off to eat or sleep.
They have been processing, examining and analysing data, and sometimes even dreaming about it when they sleep. There's enough data to keep Huygens scientists busy for months and even years to come.

... but still space-related:

New Titan panorama from Huygens! Complete with a worryingly Earth-like 'coastline' - I don't think anyone's decided if the dark areas actually contain any liquid or not, but still utterly intriguing. ;-)

Oh, and now back to our scheduled broadcast. Satellite losses, not good. Big investment and all that, and long lead-time to launching replacements. Whatever!

See here

The main ship Beagle was carried on, Mars Express (European) is working fine.

It's really amazing to look at a picture of something knowing that, an hour before, nobody had ever seen it before.

That's exactly what I was thinking yesterday when I first saw this photo from Titan's surface.

I was at work at the time. Exploring space from my desk at the office. :)

They only had this photo on the ESA Cassini-Huygens page at the time. I was happily stunned after messing with the URL and discovering a photo taken from Titan's surface.

It's really amazing to look at a picture of something knowing that, an hour before, nobody had ever seen it before.

That's exactly what I was thinking yesterday when I first saw this photo from Titan's surface.

I was at work at the time. Exploring space from my desk at the office. :)

They only had this photo on the ESA Cassini-Huygens page at the time. I was happily stunned after messing with the URL and discovering a photo taken from Titan's surface.

Visiting the ESA site with some of the pictures, I eagerly clicked on the HI-RES JPG link, only to get a 305x261 image that I can barely make out on my 1024x768 monitor!
I suppose that's what one should expect of a picture that's got to travel 15 million km or something, but still disappointing.

Visiting the ESA site with some of the pictures, I eagerly clicked on the HI-RES JPG link, only to get a 305x261 image that I can barely make out on my 1024x768 monitor!
I suppose that's what one should expect of a picture that's got to travel 15 million km or something, but still disappointing.

Yes, I think you are right that these pictures rule out the possibility that the dark areas are seas. If you look at this panorama it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed "sea". Yet once it lands, this picture from the ground clearly shows nothing but rocks and dirt. And if you look closely at that shot, in the upper right corner we see the sky, meaning that the supposed "horizon" line labeled there is not in fact the horizon. Instead we are looking at a large mountain or some kind of highlands beyond the dark region. Comparing that to the panorama, I think the "horizon" line is actually the "coastline" separating the light from the dark area. So we have dark plains butting up against light highlands, rather than seas and continents.

As you say, so much for the seas, they are as mythical as those on the moon.

Yes, I think you are right that these pictures rule out the possibility that the dark areas are seas. If you look at this panorama it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed "sea". Yet once it lands, this picture from the ground clearly shows nothing but rocks and dirt. And if you look closely at that shot, in the upper right corner we see the sky, meaning that the supposed "horizon" line labeled there is not in fact the horizon. Instead we are looking at a large mountain or some kind of highlands beyond the dark region. Comparing that to the panorama, I think the "horizon" line is actually the "coastline" separating the light from the dark area. So we have dark plains butting up against light highlands, rather than seas and continents.

As you say, so much for the seas, they are as mythical as those on the moon.

Holy crap! The Radar echos from Titan's surface sounds like an outtake from Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Interestingly, the probe passed close to the Sun and twice close to Venus to use their gravity for acceleration. The kind of precision they use for these calculations is truly fascinating - I mean you have to know the gravity and "course" of Venus pretty exactly to send a probe around Venus for acceleration!

Sebastian

What surprised me was what looked like river deltas. I thought Titan was way too far out for there to be water, unless its rivers of liquid gas?

Its a shame the mission was only designed for a few hours. It would have been interesting to see more or explore, but that probably would have increased costs exponentially.

this must be the best SID tune I have ever heard !
Even better than Pole Position II !

No.. That's not true at all. If you look here http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/in dex.html you'll find loads of really stunning pictures, the 3D pictures that the stereo camera captures are really superb I think.

Am I the only one who thinks ESA has completely dropped the ball here

To see the pictures go to:

1. The ESA.
2. NASA.

Pictures from the surface of Titan

Seems to me we got lucky, landed in an estuary. I think the bottom 50% of the pic is a puddle of liquid, with rocks in it. Top 25% looks like rocks to the horizon. Waiting for higher res images...

In the words of poltergeist girl. http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index. html

Here are some of the first Images:

Pic 1
Pic 2

Looks like this is the first image posted by the ESA.

Its uh... small. And rocky... I need to squint more.

http://www.cnn.com/ is showing the first pictures. "Always slow" to respond ESA http://www.esa.int/ do not have any pictures yet up on the site. Nasa tv http://http//www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows .asx/ is showing the pictures intermittently. WHY don't they have these pictures on ESA or NASA website??

Don't forget..they also have a microphone just in case you never heard a alien fart.

15:26 Confirmation received that Huygens probe data was successfully communicated to the Cassini spacecraft

15:00 First Huygens probe data expected at around 16:00
Probe life has now been over 5 hours

14:10 Playback of probe data begins
Ground control confirms that a signal is still being received on Earth from the Huygens probe, suggesting its batteries lasted well beyond the minimum design limit of 2 hours 15 minutes

13:47 Cassini Orbiter has been turned in its orbit to poin the high gain antenna towards Earth

12:30 Confirmation given of signal tracking for at least 2 hours

11:24 Estimated time of surface impact and end of the descent phase

11:23 Descent lamp activated to provide ground reflectivity measurements

11:12 Cassini spacecraft undergoes closest approach to Titan passing at an altitude of 60 000 km at a speed of 5.4 km per second

10:30 Green Bank 110 m telescope confirms a carrier signal from the Huygens probe.
Signal indicates that the probe has survived the entry phase and that the instrument payload is active.

ESA has just announced that the Titan mission has been a success and that data is being downloaded from the Cassini orbiter. Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing sounds from another world...

The best coverage available is at NASA web site. The first images are expected by 17:15 ET. Press conference videos, descent time line, video status reports and projected areas which the Huygens probe would photograph during the descend can be found at the European Space Agency.
The web site also has a very cool 3-D model of the Huygens probe.

The best coverage available is at NASA web site. The first images are expected by 17:15 ET. Press conference videos, descent time line, video status reports and projected areas which the Huygens probe would photograph during the descend can be found at the European Space Agency.
The web site also has a very cool 3-D model of the Huygens probe.

Good News from Titan !

The Great Big Telescope (officially the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope) at Green Bank, West Virginia has detected the carrier signal from the Huygens probe.

This means that the spacecraft is alive, has made it through re-entry, and the parachute has deployed.

A total of 17 radio telescopes here on Earth are tracking the Huygens probe, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Using phase referenced VLBI, it should be possible to track the Huygens descent to within about a kilometer on Titan, and to get descent velocities to within a few millimeters / second along the line of site. This will give us a pretty good idea of the winds that the probe encounters as it descends, and also should really nail down the rotation of Titan if the probe makes it to the surface. Here is a more detailed description (pdf file) of what's being done using VLBI from Leonid Gurvits.

While this does not mean that the Huygens mission is a full success (I personally want pictures from the surface!), it does mean that some scientific data will be returned. I can't wait to see more.

Good News from Titan !

The Great Big Telescope (officially the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope) at Green Bank, West Virginia has detected the carrier signal from the Huygens probe.

This means that the spacecraft is alive, has made it through re-entry, and the parachute has deployed.

A total of 17 radio telescopes here on Earth are tracking the Huygens probe, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Using phase referenced VLBI, it should be possible to track the Huygens descent to within about a kilometer on Titan, and to get descent velocities to within a few millimeters / second along the line of site. This will give us a pretty good idea of the winds that the probe encounters as it descends, and also should really nail down the rotation of Titan if the probe makes it to the surface. Here is a more detailed description (pdf file) of what's being done using VLBI from Leonid Gurvits.

While this does not mean that the Huygens mission is a full success (I personally want pictures from the surface!), it does mean that some scientific data will be returned. I can't wait to see more.