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Cassini Probe Does Titan Flyby
EccentricAnomaly writes "Today, Cassini had its first close encounter with Titan around 8:30AM PDT. Data from the flyby will start coming down around 6:30PM PDT, and you can watch the pictures live on NASA TV. If you want higher resolution or just to stare at one picture for a while, the raw images will be put on the web right away, with pretty press images to follow the next day. And if you want to know about the observations planned for the flyby, you can read this PDF or watch this animation."
From NASA's faq - "Cassini stores the gathered information on two Solid State Recorders (SSR) with a combined capacity of 4 gigabits, about the volume of a compact disk (500MB)."
It seems scientists are pretty confident that they can unload much data during Cassini's 9 hours downlink session.
Imagine if there were some downtimes when earth communication cannot be established for a couple of days...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They have to be confident. If the system goes for N days without contact, I suspect they'll have far greater worries than just overfull download buffers. Say like - why isn't our little lost machine talking to us?
What if they spy aliens? Won't that cause a little alarm amongst the general population?
I understand from the webpage that NASA TV can be received by anyone with a satellite decoder and presumably TV stations to rebroadcast images.
They include "live mission feeds" and live images that we can see from the Cassini prove.
Knowing NASA's lineage, is there any form of delay applied to these 'live' feeds? Or could we one day see something which may otherwise be classified (alien waving at the camera, dead astronaut) on the screen in real-time?
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
it seems that everybody is looking at mars and wondering why are space program is not really doing too much. Its good to show the public the vast and very unique moons of the gas giants. I am looking forward to see if they are going to do a "fly by" on the moon with the completely water frozen surface, orbiting jupiter (or maybe it was saturn). as long as NASA doesnt screw up and place anything backwards or messes up on unit conversions, then they have my support again!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
This is cool. It is a map pointing out where the lander is targeted. The map was made from prior flybys and also shows where today's mission is to image.
If the dark stuff really is liquid goop, as some speculate, I wish they would target a little to the north to land right in the stuff and float. I would much rather see images from floating on a lake of goop than yet more rocks. We got enough of rocks from Mars, Venus, the moon, and Eros. Time for liguid landings. Please NASA, retarget for the sake of Goop!
Table-ized A.I.
NASA just finished building their new supercomputer, and it's already been slashdotted. Actually, the second try worked, but the first one gave me a server busy message.
The NASA TV feed is pretty interesting. They just went through a series of photos from one of the cameras taking shots at different wavelengths which very dramatically displayed the effect of wavelength "windows." They also mentioned that they sampled the upper atmosphere on the way through, so maybe there will be something interesting to tell as a result of that.
There is a plan made up by some NASA engineers called HOPE, which would be a manned mission to Callisto in 2045. Sadly I don't think it will happen, at least not that soon, but one could hope, right? At least it shows that these people are thinking about something more than just moon and mars... even though we don't have permanent settlements on either one, we will, and when we do, it's good to have some plans on what to do next. Colonization of Callisto and perhaps Ganymede would be beautiful.
Hmmm I was wondering if changing the gas inside would help performance / reliability / heat