Saving Huygens

TazMainiac writes "This months IEEE Spectrum is running an article on how a Swedish scientist discovered that the Titan probe Cassini had a communications flaw that would cause it to lose all data sent back from the Huygens lander as it plunges into Titan's atmosphere. The problem - Doppler effect. The fix: go read the article."

Comments

Re:Dont Bother Reading Long Article

[orac2]

Sure, everyone knows that a)something Doppler related went wrong with Huygens and b) they fixed it with "fancy flying", but that's like saying don't bother to read a history of World War II because everyone knows a) Hitler started it and b) the Allies won.

The point of the story was to explain the problem with a level of accuracy and detail that was simply missing from most report and to tell the story of some stone-cold great work by an engineer, something of interest to most engineers, and I would hazard, to most slashdotters.

As far as I am aware, no-one else has told the story of how Boris Smeds pushed through the comms test that showed something was wrong, despite intial rejection and then later, modified it on the fly to reveal the problem was Doppler related, saving months of delay. Learning about his example of how to be a great engineers is the article's real utility, not teaching Spectrum readers how to fix Titan landers.

Disclaimer -- I edited this story for IEEE Spectrum