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."

Comments

IEEE spectrum

[ballpoint]

There is an interesting article (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/oct04/1004titan.html) in the current issue of IEEE spectrum. They discuss how a disaster was avoided by Boris Smeds who pushed for stringent tests of the communication between Cassini and Huygens. It turns out that the Italian manufacturers of the radio didn't take into account the significant doppler shift between both craft. As the firmware of the radio could not be remotely upgraded, Cassini's trajectory was altered (further away from Titan) to lower these doppler shifts.

Let's hope no other misfortunes turn up.

Re:Tricky descent, hope ESA got the tech right.

[cmowire]

Camera, yes.

Power and computing ability to handle the storage and transmission of a lot of video, no.

Besides, the main thing that they need is a few good frames at high resolution, not a whole bunch of low resolution frames. Unfortunately, we're not at the point where you can put stuff in a probe that's not necessary for science or spacecraft engineering but looks cool yet.

Although, on the earth side, it's different. Notice how it seems to take a mission control room with 16 NASA scientists, none of whom are doing anything *other* than watching their screens because of the massive light-speed delay prevents them from commanding it before it'll be too late, where any data is already being recorded for later analysis, etc. I mean, it looks cool and if I was a NASA scientist, I'm sure *I'd* be nagging my pointy haired boss to let me sit in the control room during landing, but it's not really necessary. ;)

I think the answer to your question about abandoning poor Huygens is that it's a communications window. After 3 hours, it's no longer at the right angles and range and whatnot to properly make contact. Plus it'll be out of juice by that point.