Slashdot Mirror
Huygens Landing on Titan to be Tricky
neutron_p writes "On Jan. 14, 2005, Huygens probe will plow into the orange atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan. It will be flying blind through hydrocarbon haze and methane clouds to a surface that could consist of seven-kilometer-high ice mountains and liquid methane seas. Scientists hope that Huygens will survive the plunge. I hope too, especially after Genesis mission accident, although condition were much better."
Preprogrammed based on what we *think* are the actual conditions there... now the landing will prove whether or not the readings and predictions were right. Considering there is not going to be any way to adjust for surprises on the way down I think that would qualify for at least mildly ticky...
How do you figure we've never had practice building or repairing these things? Cassini/Huygens specifically, no. But it's not like the technology is brand new to us. There are Voyager spares on board Cassini, for example. And it's not like we've never had to do a long-distance repair on one of these guys before. So far, Cassini has had the main camera go foggy (repaired it) and the Huygen's probe turn out to be unable to communicate with Cassini (altered the flight plan to circumvent the problem). To use your car analogy, it's like saying that we're in the dark about building a given new model. Of course we aren't, most of what's there is old hat to the designers.
Besides, when you spend $3 billion on the thing, you buy a lot more quality control than your typical automobile.
Also, you shouldn't forget that Cassini has heaters on board. So "cold" might not be as much of a worry as you think.