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Titan's Alien Thunder
An anonymous reader writes "What is not being reported much about the fascinating Huygens descent to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is its remarkable microphone. In the silence of space, the probe offers a platform for listening to alien thunder while watching the lightning strike on this alien world--the only moon with an atmosphere thicker than our terrestrial one. The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005. The landing target on Titan borders a bright-dark region thought to be an oil-rich shoreline. Huygens can float for a few hours while still broadcasting if it lands in a lake of oil."
...that crop up around here from time to time after setbacks, you HAVE to be amazed by what they have accomplished on an ever-shrinking budget.
Kudos, NASA! Some of us are still impressed!
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Oxygen is an explosive gas...
Actually, the idea is to combine oxygen with hydrocarbons and use the surplus energy. In our atmosphere (with plenty of oxygen), you bring the hydrocarbons. On titan (apparently with plenty of hydrocarbons), you would bring the oxygen. Same result.
Also,
the CCDs on the mars rover (and probably others) are monochrome CCDs. So, for every color picture, 3 are taken, filtered at 3 specific wavelengths (which happen to be, R, G, and B.) The image data is then recomposed into a full-color image here on earth.
"consumer" CCDs, for the most part, may be "5 megapixels" but they count an individual red, green, and blue sensor element as a pixel, and then interpolate to get the full resolution they claim.
NASA's way of doing it with a monochrome CCD and filters means you get a true 1 mpixel image in stunning detail.