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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."
"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.
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.
Wait...are you wishing them good luck in Metric or English measurements?
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.
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.
What I've thought was so cool about all of this is that they've taken IR pictures throgh the haze. They can see things, but they haven't a clue what they're looking at. Now that's cool!
I've seen Titan myself many times, but only as a tiny spark of light along for the ride with Saturn. I've seen 5 of the 35 moons through my backyard telescope.
I wish the ESA folks all the best.
...laura
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).
Surface touchdown is at 12:34 GMT, and cassini stops receiving data at 14:44 GMT - so the probe could in theory send for 2 hours from the surface.
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
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?
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...