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Huygens Probe Prepares for Saturn Moon Landing
Nathan writes "A probe is about to land on one of Saturn's 35 moons, Titan. The probe is a collaboration with NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's space program. The probe is apparently about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. This landing should lead scientists toward new information about the atmosphere and the magnetosphere."
I wish everybody involved good luck
"The probe is apparently about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle."
An original Beetle, or a Super Beetle? Or even a new water-cooled "New Beetle"?
With the Italian involvement, wouldn't comparing it to a Volkswagen Scirocco be more appropriate?
at least the probe isn't being compared to a Ford Probe...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I sure hope they have insurance.
Oh, and just for clarification, how many Libraries of Congress are there in a VW Beetle?
I hope we can find decent parking.
Look closer
What amazes me is that Mars, a planet with a third the mass of Earth, has two moons whereas we only have one. Saturn has 35 moons! And two rings!
I wish Earth were as cool as that.
As for dropping loads onto other planets, I'm not so sure this is really a great idea. If there is life up there and we pop an Earth-bacteria near it, there's no telling how bad a disaster it would be for the life colonies on Titan. If anyone remembers in Star Trek 3 when a small worm was dropped on Genesis, it evolved into a huge mutant worm that attacked Kirk and McCoy. With no natural predators, a tiny bacterium could become the worst enemy of whatever life there is on that rocky moon.
Increase your monitor resolution.
Unknown host pong.
Actually there are 4 in the /. picture
It's very misty and murky there.
I hope the probe has windscreen wipers, otherwise it's another few million dollars down the toilet for NASA. Seriously, they need this mission to work, with their recent record, if they want to maintain any of the remnants of their credibility.
Good luck, guys.
... at SpaceFlight Now
:(
It'd be worth staying up for, but the last time I did that, I jinxed the Mars Polar Lander.
If the Huygens timeline executes as planned, it will rank among the coolest engineering achievements in history. It will also have happened thanks to one guy who kept his eye on the ball when nobody else was paying attention.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I didn't know Italy had a space program, though I suppose it makes sense.
"It's really very cold." ... Temperatures hover around -292 F (-180 C) ...
And the understatement award of the year goes to...Candice Hansen, a scientist for the Cassini-Huygens mission!
This flies in the face of science.
How dare you call Einstein's head a moon.
In other news, NASA has decided that the next Saturn probe will have a sticker that says "Saturn revolves around the earth". A judge in Georgia will be reviewing the inevitable lawsuit.
What gets to me about this is the fact that we will truly be seeing something that no human being has ever seen before... I just hope that everything works according to plan...and that they land with a splash instead of a thud :)
Requiem
actually the article says there are only 33 known moons.
called "Herbie the Love Probe." Wait...that doesn't sound right. It won't be a TV movie, it'll be the new hot pr0n on satellite. It'll certainly be easy to transmit!
I'm so going to hell now.
Here is the official ESA countdown! At the moment, it's only 4 hours left! :) However, after landing, it will take another 5 hours before the data starts coming in, and we know wether it was a success or a failure.
In the application, you can also fastforward and see what Cassini does in the coming years.
Dude, NASA are sending out space probes. Each one is new, different, and complex. They travel utterly incomprehensible distances and deal with really difficult environments. I'm usually astonished whenever one works.
Then there's the small matter of the mars rovers, which both worked beyond all possible expectations.
NASA have had their fair share of screw-ups, but I think if there's anything to take them to task about its their beaurocracy and the amount it costs them to do things, rather than their success rate. I'd like to see them able to lob off far more probes for less money, even if a few more failed, but that doesn't seem to be how they work.
Note that I'm no NASA fanboy, just trying to be a little realistic here.
please join our irc channel #space on irc.freenode.net
;-)
This channel is devoted to discussion of space science, current, past and future space missions.
This channel is frequented by a lot of knowledgeable folk. And please keep the discussion on topic
Y
no sig.
The probe was built by the ESA, not NASA. Cassini is NASA, Huygens probe is ESA.
And NASA's Mars rovers are still going strong, whereas the ESA's Beagle is just a crater.
Don't forget to check out #Space on irc.freenode.net for a discussion of the Fuygens events today!
Einstein makes it 5....
but hopefully audio as well.
From SpaceflightNow
"Also among the expected post-landing data are sounds from a microphone that might capture the rustling of frigid nitrogen winds or lapping waves."
I've see Uranus, too. And it's not worth the trip.
I wonder if they'll find Alex WildStar's missile ship #17... Perhaps, they'll even find his gun. Watch out for the Gamelon tank...
If you don't what I'm talking about, then you've probably never had the pleasure of watching the "Star Blazers" series... I used to run home from the school bus stop to watch it...
Andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
After using Adblock in Firefox to block half a dozen ad iframes, that website that the article links to is pretty stark. Almost boring. I nearly had to turn the ads back on.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
They can just say it's another "Deep Impact" probe.
:-D
Nobody would even know
>> The probe is a collaboration with NASA, the
>> European Space Agency
Oh, boy, this will be a hard landing then. NASA shoulds send rovers to repair this thing after it "lands".
"I for one welcome our Earthly overlords..."
Hats off to NASA for the 2 rovers, lets hope we learn as much from this. Scary thought, Windows Space Probe Edition. Huygens: image source = bl_scr01.jpg NASA: Crap.
lol: You see no door there!
Let's hope the probe's designers had lots of Landingvergnugen.
Sigs are bad for your health.
The data transmitted by Huygens will be uploaded to the Cassini spaceprobe and then transmitted by Cassini back to Earth several times. This data will be received by the NASA DSN dishes such as that a Tidbinbilla near Canberra in Australia.
Separate to this will be a unique experimental observation organised by JIVE, the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe that will involve 17 radio telescopes around the world including the Parkes dish in NSW. They will monitor the weak signal of the Huygens probe directly to detct any doppler shift in the signal. Using VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) astronomers hope to be able to pinpoint the entry of Huygens into Titan's atmosphere to within 1 km. As it descends under parachute they also hope to use doppler shifts to measure the speed of the wind at different levels in the atmosphere. Should be an interesting observation.
(Disclaimer; I work for one of the institutes involved in this experiment)
doesn't the probe have an RTG or some power source other than a battery? It's a shame to have come all this way with only a very short operating life for the probe.
I got herpes from a love probe once...
And I agree that the Italian contractor fucked it up badly.
As of 12:40 am eastern, NASA's countdown stands at 4 hours and 37 minutes for Huygens' decent. Should be some interesting news tommorrow morning.
lol: You see no door there!
Cassini discovered some new ones a few months ago. They probably forgot to include those.
You will find very many popular science articles that use the Beetle as a standard of measurement. Most often as a weight measurement. This may have something to do with the budgets of science teachers through the last half of the 20th century. As many of them could not afford a newer model Beetle, we can safely assume its the old one.
Beagle 2 was not an ESA probe but rather a British project which piggybacked on ESA's Mars Express orbiter (which is going strong by the way).
in this 2.4MB PDF.
Your sig is awfully similar to one I received years ago in an email from a fellow at Tek.
Probably more due to it being visually memorable, made over many years and found worldwide.
Cassini hasn't been flawless. There's a leak in the fuel tank pressurization system that they've managed to work around.
This story wrongly calls the Huygens probe a NASA/ESA/(italian spage agency?) cooperation, whereas Huygens is actually strictly the work of ESA. The Cassini-Huygens mission *is* however a NASA/ESA undertaking. I'm not trying to play down NASA's contribution, which is of course critical to the success of the whole enterprise, however since a previous slashdot story about the mission talked about "NASA's Cassini probe", I feel it's only fitting that the credit for the success (or impending failure, naturally) be given to ESA.
Shit, don't tell the FCC; they'll fine the Deepspace Network.
There was more of saturn yesterday than just Huygens landing. Check out my blog entry on the same detailing why it was a day to die for saturn: http://freepgs.com/abhishek/journal/2005/01/day-to -die-for-saturn.html
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla is running a weblog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. This weblog will be updated as events happen, so it should be interesting to watch.
It also looks like NASA TV will have live coverage for much of Friday. You can access their video and audio streams here.
Trash ESA if you want, but at least make an intelligent argument while you do it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Um, and then move them even closer together, really fast, if the probe is ever captured by hostile Martians and needs to self-destruct. ;-)
Or does the stuff in RTGs not decay faster when it gets neutrons sprayed at it?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Are you talking about the superiority of the scientific instruments or the equipment to make it land safely? Also, it might be good to consider the fact that ESA has attempted one (1) landing on another celestial body, and it was with an underfunded, rushed project. The Soviet Union/Russia and NASA hasn't always been successful either, not even with the vast experience that they do have with landing probes. So if Huygens will crash or not doesn't have to do with the scientific instruments or whether they are superior (superior to what? the instruments on Cassini, which are designed for other purposes?) but rather if the heatshield works, if the parachutes work, if the calculations regarding the atmosphere are accurate enough, etc. Let's hope it does descend without any problems, but also be prepared that this could be a total failure. But both you and I know that you can't say it will fail, unless you have some superior insight into this project, how it's designed, its trajectory and the environment on Titan. Well, then at least we tried. Next time someone will try again, with a few experiences richer. Don't be such an electron.
Hurray! Ah, that brings back the memories... Yes, Wildstar found his brother's ship on Titan...
But how did Alex manage to travel all the way to Iscandar without the help of FTL drive, or warp technology? It took the Star Force the better part of year to get there.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Fortunately the landing isn't the only science the probe is designed for. Unlike Beagle, the probe will be transmitting measurements throughout its descent. So even if it smacks down like NASAs Genesis most of the mission goals will have been achieved.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Beware of Thanos The Mad Titan!! Oh if only The Silver Surfer or Adam Warlock were there to ensure your safety!
So is atmospheric entry at 10:06 CET or 11:13 CET?
I haven't seen any sign of a dedicated news page yet. I hope the ESA is ready to get news on their web site
Also why do they have to advertise everything in CET? UT works fine for me here in zone +11
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I won't blame anyone who hasn't RTFA for this news, because here is the really interesting link: the ESA (European Space Agency) portal.
/. moderators would care a bit more when posting news. Recently the interesting links were often missing. A link to a press agency article may be interesting to some, but we have other sources for that. I expect a bit more from a /. news: the poster should at list post links to official sites with deeper information.
A 346 words article from India Daily is not the most relevant for an ESA project.
I hope
First, Beagle was British, not ESA.
Second, the screw-up with Cassini/Huygens was Italian, not ESA.
Third, have you forgotten Giotto?
It seems that the ESA can be successful, but individual European nations can't.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
The US engineers did not discover the problem. It was a Swedish engineer.
Furthermore: "Alenia Spazio (the Italian contractor) wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error that would threaten to turn Huygens's moment of glory into an embarrassing failure."
Get your facts right (although being AC, no doubt it was just xenophobic bullshit on your part).
Did he inhale?
See previous post. They all F'd Up.
Did he inhale?
So you have faith in NASA because of the Mars Orbiter FU?
Did he inhale?
The whole collaboration screwed up:
"The [investigation] board discovered that Alenia Spazio SpA, the Rome-based company that built the radio link, had properly anticipated the need to make the receiver sensitive over a wide enough range of frequencies to detect Huygens's carrier signal even when Doppler shifted."
So far, so good.
Furthermore:
"Alenia Spazio wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error..."
The problem they all missed was:
"... another subtle consequence: Doppler shift would affect not just the frequency of the carrier wave that the probe's vital observations would be transmitted on but also the digitally encoded signal itself. In effect, the shift would push the signal out of synch with the timing scheme used to recover data from the phase-modulated carrier."
In fact:
"In proposing this more complex test with simulated telemetry, Smeds (the Swedish engineer) 'had to argue with those who didn't think it was necessary,' recalled JPL's Mitchell. Smeds was persistent and continued championing the test even after it was initially rejected. In the end, with the backing of Sollazzo and Huygens's project scientist (at ESA), Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Smeds's plan was accepted because it was easy to do, even though hardly anybody seemed to think it was worth doing."
Nobody's perfect, even NASA/JPL couldn't make their minds up how to measure stuff which caused the Mars Orbiter burn up...
Did he inhale?
If you really want to find out about what happened about the design of the radio link between Huygens and Cassini and who who exactly discovered the problem and was insistent enough to get it fixed, then read this excellent article in IEEE's Spectrum:
u re /oct04/1004titan.html
:)
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeat
hint: it was a Swede working at ESA in Germany... so much about team play
First images from the probe are very curious indeed.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
According to ESA's website: The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, USA, a part of the global network of radio telescopes involved in tracking the Huygens Titan probe, has detected the probe's carrier signal.
This means that the probe survived the entry (heat-shield) phase of the descent and the main parachute opened, but we still have to wait for the main part of the show...
The Huygens probe was piggybacked on NASA's Cassini probe.
Of course, the whole mission is *joint* as the signals from the Huygens probe have to be relayed by Cassini, not to mention Cassini getting it there in the first place.
But the Huygens probe and all the details retrieved by it are ESA (and Italian) work, NOT NASA.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
...can be found at http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/status.html. You're welcome.
RHCE; are you certified? Karma: ambiguous.
This landing should lead scientists toward new information about the atmosphere and the magnetosphere.
This sentence is intellectual pablum. Titan does not have a significant magnetic field. Huygens will be examining the chemical composition of the atmosphere and surface, and will provide detailed imaging of both. Today is a day for the pure thrill of exploration of a hidden and exotic world!
an ill wind that blows no good
Space.com has an interesting time line on the event.
So let me get this straight. I submit this story, which is at least twice as long as this one and with more details, yesterday at 11:50 am and it gets rejected yet this story gets posted 12 hours later.
Yes I'm grousing and no I don't care if you mod me down.
I can't remember who said the following on here but they were correct: Slashdot is Fark without the boobies.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, USA, a part of the global network of radio telescopes involved in tracking the Huygens Titan probe, has detected the probe's 'carrier' (tone) signal.
go huygens!
I don't know how the two organizations are related to each other, but I guess there is a reason why JPL has been assigned jpl.nasa.gov for their Internet domain name.
Thats no moon!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Damn that brings back memories. Didn't they wind up finding him on Iscandar? or am I thinking of Mark Venture... Kudos for that trip down memory lane
FYI. The Science Channel will be airing a show tonight at 9pm EST. Why so late I don't know? Maybe to give NASA/ESA time to analyze the data and present some conclusions? If the probe has already landed I would think the data would be coming back before 12 hours from now?
My boy, my boy!
This mission is very exciting. In an introductory chemistry course one might learn of the "triple-point" of a substance. This is the point at which a substance may exist as a vapor, a liquid, or a solid. Earth's atmosphere allows for the triple-point of water which we all should know is vital to our functionality as living beings. Titan's atmosphere allows for the triple-point of methane. It is speculated that this may allow for a mechanism of life based on methane. Discovery of extraterrestrial life WILL change everything. Good Luck on your mission, gentleman. The world is with you and eager.
It appears you don't have your facts straight either.
NASA didn't catch the error because Alenia Spazio refused to share details since they saw JPL as competitors; NASA was never allowed to see the receiver design. They assumed the Italians were smart enough to compensate for the effect on their own, which proved not to be the case.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The Planetary Society's has a Huygens blog going from the European Space Operation Centre in Darmstadt, Germany through January 15. Latest update is huygens' signal kept going after landing.
Good News from Titan !
The Great Big Telescope (officially the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope) at Green Bank, West Virginia has detected the carrier signal from the Huygens probe.
This means that the spacecraft is alive, has made it through re-entry, and the parachute has deployed.
A total of 17 radio telescopes here on Earth are tracking the Huygens probe, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Using phase referenced VLBI, it should be possible to track the Huygens descent to within about a kilometer on Titan, and to get descent velocities to within a few millimeters / second along the line of site. This will give us a pretty good idea of the winds that the probe encounters as it descends, and also should really nail down the rotation of Titan if the probe makes it to the surface. Here is a more detailed description (pdf file) of what's being done using VLBI from Leonid Gurvits.
While this does not mean that the Huygens mission is a full success (I personally want pictures from the surface!), it does mean that some scientific data will be returned. I can't wait to see more.
So what unit conversion will go wrong this time...beetles to cubic feet or stories to meters?
rj
At the time I write this they've only "heard" the bleep transmitter. This is a minimal device to show the probe is working and where it might be on its journey.
The original system incorrectly compensated of the Doppler shifting of frequencies (I recall there was no compensation designed in). This means as the two probes and Titan move through space, the signals shift a bit to different frequencies. The fix was to select an impact orbit with lesser relative velocities than they had originally planned. If the attenna doesnt get all the signals, then they could be lost.
No - he's hypothesising, rather than guessing.... The point, clearly, is that there are a lot of Kuiper Belt objects around, so doublets are much more likely, whereas a double planet system of a much larger size, like that of the Earth-Moon system, is far less likely. Capturing a free floating object the size of the moon is much more unlikely - current theory suggests the moon was created by a giant impact, another potentially difficult thing to happen in the right conditions for the moon to have formed.
The mass and ratio of mass of the Earth-Moon system might be very difficult to get, a potentially important component of the Drake equation that explains why we can't ask the wise ones for all the answers....
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV
"A NASA probe to tighten a moon of Saturn"
Doh!
ESA has just announced that the Titan mission has been a success and that data is being downloaded from the Cassini orbiter. Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing sounds from another world...
I'm not that fellow. I don't even know what Tek is (except if it's Tektronix). :0)
Cute. Also here's a read image of Titan.
Those are either rocks or giant cryomushrooms in the foreground.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
See here
The main ship Beagle was carried on, Mars Express (European) is working fine.