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."

Comments

4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[fembots]

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...

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[Macphisto]

Imagine if there were some downtimes when earth communication cannot be established for a couple of days...

Good Lord, man! What in blazes are you planning?

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[badfrog]

Interference has always been a huge factor, the Space Shuttle still used iron-core memory in its systems in the late 80s, because it wasn't affected by radiation. Can't just pop in some SDRAM and expect it to work out there.

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[HunahpuMonkey]

> 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...

According to CNN that very problem exists. The buffers in those recorders are in danger of writing over the data before it can sucessfully be sent to Earth.

"The flyby of Titan was expected to go smoothly in space, but bad weather on Earth could affect Cassini's transmissions to the Deep Space Network, scientists said.

Cassini has only one chance to send data back to Earth before it is overwritten with data from its next set of observations, scientists said."

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[Rei]

Not *always*. When Cassini isn't doing an encounter, it's sitting around doing pretty much nothing (regular bits of telemetry data, random readings, occasional snaps of Saturn or distant shots of moons, etc). Greater storage space, even if not accompanied by an increased bandwidth improvement, allow you to gather more data from your insturments during flybys, which you can transmit during the less-important inter-flyby periods.

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[Tablizer]

Yeah, the next probes sent to space really should use microdrives for backup at least. I mean, put an IPod on a probe and not only will the probe be able to store tens of GBs of data, but it could even play MP3s on a simulated speaker through the entire mission. Besides, if a probe finds a representative of an intelligent race out there, it could use its IPod to swap music.

This is why NASA does not hire 14-year-olds.

Links to the actual Quicktime and GIF files

[waynegoode]

The links on the webpage open pop-up windows to show the video. You can't right click and save the files. I did a little right-clicking and source viewing and found the URLs of the actual files.

• Large Quicktime
• Large GIF Small
• Small Quicktime
• Small GIF Small

Aliens

[Indy Media Watch]

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?

Re:Aliens

[Timesprout]

Well normally when pixar do the special effects for these missions there are no issues. I believe the faking effects for this mission have been outsourced to Bollywood due to budget constraints so please dont be alarmed if the mission actually turns out to be a love story between Cassini and Hygens and several hirsuite men in colourful outfits burst into a song and dance routine halfway through it.

sci.space.news

[noselasd]

Subject: Cassini Image: Eyes on Xanadu
From: baalke@earthlink.net (Ron)
Newsgroups: sci.space.news
Followup-To: sci.space.policy
Date: 26 Oct 2004 09:25:07 -0700

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multim ed ia/pia06107.html

Eyes on Xanadu
October 25, 2004

Cassini image of Titan, revealing the bright continent-sized terrain
known as Xanadu

This image taken on Oct. 24, 2004, reveals Titan's bright
"continent-sized" terrain known as Xanadu. It was acquired with the
narrow angle camera on Cassini's imaging science subsystem through a
spectral filter centered at 938 nanometers, a wavelength region at which
Titan's surface can be most easily detected. The surface is seen at a
higher contrast than in previously released imaging science subsystem
images due to a lower phase angle (Sun-Titan-Cassini angle), which
minimizes scattering by the haze.

The image shows details about 10 times smaller than those seen from
Earth. Surface materials with different brightness properties (or
albedos) rather than topographic shading are highlighted. The image has
been calibrated and slightly enhanced for contrast. It will be further
processed to reduce atmospheric blurring and to optimize mapping of
surface features. The origin and geography of Xanadu remain mysteries at
this range. Bright features near the south pole (bottom) are clouds. On
Oct. 26, Cassini will acquire images of features in the central-left
portion of this image from a position about 100 times closer.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team
is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the
Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

And

Cassini-Huygens makes first close approach to Titan

Today the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft makes a fly-by of Saturn's
largest moon Titan - the closest ever performed.

Read more:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens /SEMB2E 0A90E_0.html

Bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would the aliens think if they get a peace offering of music, only to get sued by RIAA shortly thereafter?

good flavor

[Striker770S]

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!

Re:The raw pictures will be put up right away?

[mikael]

What if they spy aliens? Won't that cause a little alarm amongst the general population?

No, the central government of Titan have contingency plans to reassure the Titanian public that anything they see is merely a weather balloon, a stray asteroid or a reflection of Venus.

Also sampling Titan's atmosphere...

[jangobongo]

Not only will the Cassini be taking pictures, but its ion and neutral mass spectrometer will "scoop up" and sample Titan's atmosphere as it passes at a distance of 1,200 kilometers (745 miles).

"One important goal of this flyby is to confirm scientists' model of Titan's atmosphere to prepare for the Huygens probe descent," according to this article at SpaceDaily.com.

raw images

[Anonymous Coward]

The raw images may be higher resolution but guess what....they are also "raw"! That means they haven't been processed yet. The image data isn't very useful unless you have the necessary parameters / algorithms to process the data.

There will be several steps in processing the image data, bad pixel correction (I guess these CCDs should have very few); white/black balance; tonal / grey calibration; others? I'd be surprised if there weren't a few others.

I guess the white/black balance is the most important thing I mentioned ....responsiveness accross the CCD won't be the same and must be compensated for. I don't know if they've got a seperate grey calibration step (you'd need calibration data to reproduce it)....you could fiddle with tone curves yourself to make stuff pleasing to the eye / see different stuff.

Can anyone supply more details on the calibration?

So far as I know it's not worth downloading the raw images unless you want to exercise some bandwidth....I think that Nasa might give out the calibration data to some people (remember British scientists discovering possible new moon?)....Anyone know all the ins and outs?

Holy Shit!!!

[Thaidog]

It's the death star! Red Alert!
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gs2.cgi ?path=.. /multimedia/images/large-moons/images/image17.jpg& type=image