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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 hope we can find decent parking.
Mars has 2 captured asteroids as moons (most likely), whereas we have a gigantic almost-a-double-planet-system going. It's not surprising that Mars, one of the asteroid belt "border" planets would have such a moon (let a lone 2).
... 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.
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
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.
Ah, but the Earth is cooler than the other side of the pillow. Our moon is very large in comparison to the size of Earth. Viewed from afar, the Earth/Moon combination must appear to be more like a set of twin planets, instead of a planet/satellite combination. Saturns planets, while some may be large, appear to be very small in comparison to Saturn.
While none of us have experience in checking out other solar systems, I'll be willing to hypothesize that, in this galaxy, there are very few planet/satellite combinations that are very comparable in mass/size (as the Earth/Moon combo is).
Check back with me when we get to Alpha Centauri in 10,000 years.
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.
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."
Don't worry, Planetary Protection Officers are insane. About every probe that leaves Earth is baked in an oven to sterilize it.
"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!
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)
Like the Pluto/Chiron?. Closer ration than Earth/Moon.. So there is a closer ratio example in *our* system.
Hypothesis are suppose to educated guesses based on *current* knowledge. Thus, you are not hypothesizing, but just guessing.
Once it leaves the insulating vacuum of space and settles into the -300F atmosphere of Titan (almost as cold as liquid nitrogen), the probe is going to freeze solid in short order. It would probably be hard to include an RTG with enough juice to keep it warm on Titan without it overheating the probe on the 7-year trip.
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).
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.
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.
Check back with me when we get to Alpha Centauri in 10,000 years
Pah! We'll be on future tech 47 by then and probably have a Conquest victory before you get your Space Race victory. Besides, the game ends in 45 years...
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
Smart people separate NASA's robotic probes program from NASA's manned spaceflight program. The former is amazingly successful and has produced incredible benefits. The latter hasn't done anything really interesting since Apollo, and it's that program which is foundering and has no credibility.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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?
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...
Great, an Earth with 35 moons. Now try putting yourself in the shoes of the guy who would have to write the tide tables. And what would the added gravitational stresses do to our tectonic situation--see Io for example. And finally, just how fricking wierd and convoluted would our religions be with that many bright and gravely portentious celestial objects flitting around the heavens? So remember, before you go and start tacking on moons, think of the ramifications first.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
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.
Planet Claire has pink air, and all the trees are red.
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.