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Huygens Probe Lands on Titan
WillDraven writes "CNN, NASA and the ESA are reporting that the Huygens space probe has entered the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan after traveling 2.2 billion miles. Pictures from the moon's surface should be available sometime this afternoon" according to the NASA TV schedule. What we know so far is that Huygens landed successfully and sent at least the carrier signal from the surface to Cassini for 90+ minutes, more than expected, and that Cassini has successfully repointed at the Earth and begun relaying the data it received, beginning with test packets. Huygens now sits on Titan, silent forever, while we wait to see whether or how much valuable data Cassini obtained and can send back. Update: 01/14 17:20 GMT by M : So far: they report zero lost packets in the transmission, but one of the two independent data-collection systems is apparently giving some problems. Update: 01/14 21:40 GMT by J : The news is pretty much all good: a very successful mission. Expect to see many photos within hours, but for now apparently only three have been released. Ice blocks or rolling stones -- let the debates begin!
Straight from the JPL:
01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100001
..to all involved engineers, scientists and all other people who made this possible!
First data should be coming in from Cassini any minute now...
We might find that the atmosphere extends from the surface on upward?!
I know it'll be a while, but I anxiously await the pictures and the sound (yes, they have a mic onboard). I guess it'll mostly be hissing, but it'll be interesting to HEAR a distant planet (one whom has a thick and nasty atmosphere).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I can't wait to see the results (and hopefully pictures)
:-(
Too bad they put such a low resolution imager on it
People of Titan, we come in peaces, pieces....
Is this because of something along the lines of the harsh environment breaking the probe down? Battery life?
While I do think it's nifty, in comparison, you have to love the Mars rovers' abilities to continue functioning so we can explore as we learn, rather than having everything pre-planned.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
all these worlds are yours, except Europa.
attempt no landings there.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
This is very exciting. I hope the probe lands in the sea, because hearing the sound of a extra-planetary sea would be a real treat.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
PhysicsGenius perhaps, but AstronomyIdiot. It's on a moon, not a planet.
You're kidding, right? Venera, Phobos, Vikings, Sojourner, Spirit/Opportunity??? (no, Beagle2 doesn't count ;-) )
not quite. remember all the crap we landed on mars? yes, I know you're trying to be funny. don't quit your day job.
What world are you living in ?
What about the mars rover?
The Venus probes in the late 70s?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Not a planet, but a moon.
hmm, there was some cheering some minutes ago on nasa tv. seems like theyre receiving some data.
Eventually, there will be net-connected satellites and probes: "You insensitive clod. By posting that link, you slashdotted the probe in Uranus."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I feel that it is because we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger. Many men and women died (yes, tragically) in those eras exploring the great unknown. But without their sacrifice, we would never have been able to accomplish what we have (please no "settling the new world = genocide" lectures).
Apollo 1, The Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia's losses were all tragic. And I am NOT saying that their loss should be shrugged off as "eh, someone had to die to explore space." What I am saying is that we as humans needed to grow and explore space, much as the Europeans needed to grow and explore beyond their continent. When there was a tragic event in colonial exploration (Jamestown), those people learned from their mistake and tried again and usually succeeded. When we fail today, we usually cower up and shut down all exploration for a half-decade or so.
Hell, look at how these stupid hippies tried to stop Cassini from ever occuring. They were so afraid of the 0.001% chance of Cassini crashing into Earth (which itself had a fraction of a percent chance of actually contaminating the planet with any plutonium) that they wanted the entire mission shut down.
Scared people like this, afraid to take chances are what almost kept us from everything glorious we're learning today and everything we will learn from Cassini tomorrow. And most scary, these people and all others who are afraid of taking chances have kept us from learning from all the cancelled missions and missions that will never be in the future because it's always "better safe than sorry" to them.
Marvin the Martian is so going to give you a wedgie and steal your lunch money, dude.
The first entrepreneurs able to get into space efficiently have a large supply of trophies and memorabilia available for salvaging!
I hope that the homesteaders on Earth's moon have the integrity to set up a barrier around the Apollo 11 landing site, that is one patch of tracks in the dust and debris that I would consider sacred.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The subject line is essentially my entire question: Will we attain the data that is streaming out from Huygens while the orbiter is outside of the line of sight?!
an extra 1.5 hours of battery life then claimed... NASA/ESA should go into building laptops.
They didn't stop recording data because Huygens went silent. Rather, Cassini had to turn to transmit its load of data. Cassini had to turn for a number of reasons ranging from the azimuth and elevation of the lander (now it is more than a probe...) with respect to the horizon, to the maximum data storage capability of Cassini itself. Not that the poster said anything wrong, it was just misleading. I believe Huygens was still transmitting at least carrier verified by Colorado (not sure which radiotelescope picked it up in the US) after Cassini was tasked to turn away. We just couldn't listen much longer, and Huygens' batteries weren't supposed to do more than 4.5 hours anyway (IIRC).
-F
I'm watching the NASA broadcast and just a few minutes ago everyone started cheering. I heard someone say they were receiving "Chain B" but not "Chain A" - these appear to be redundant instruments or something.
Seems to be going quite well...
Grr! Arg!
Er...not to be pedantic, and I'm sure the comment was meant in jest, but...
;-)
You forgot Mars and Venus, you insensitive clod.
That said, I can't wait to see pictures myself. That it transmitted for 90 minutes probably means that it landed on a solid surface, rather than sinking into an ocean or something. Hopefully they landed in a nice scenic spot.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Even better, pictures of beasts. That is of the hydrocarbon-breathing variety.
It is possible that when Cassini is in position to speak to Huygens the lander will still be operational? Is the lifetime of the lander a function of the surface temperature or the belief that it might land in liquid? My guess is the latter.
This part is an European Space Agency project. You can find out more at: http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/cassini_huygens.asp There is a link to the ESA/PPARC webcast there too. (PPARC is th British Research Council for Particle Physics and Astronomy.
I'm no science expert, but I think that's been done before.
Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Maybe you meant it's the first time that Man has placed an object on the surface of a moon outside the Earth-Moon system? That may or may not be true (I really have no idea), but it seems more likely.
Sinch
The images will be posted from the moment they are available at
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
For the first time in history, Man has placed an object on the surface of a planet outside the Earth-Moon system.
I know some of the news on slashdot can be a little old due to its nature but this is a record.. decades old news reported!
I wish it included a little rover like the ones on Mars, with an amphibious design (in case it landed in liquid something or other) and nuclear powered, since there isn't enough energy from the sun to operate at that distances. Oh well, hopefully I will live to see it.
I am anxiously awaiting the data like a kid on Xmas morning. Titan is one of the most facinating places in the solar system. I can never forget the first time I laid eyes on it in my little 8" telescope. (Actually, a good pair of binoculars should suffice if you are blessed with dark skies, look for a faint reddish "star" close to saturn.
My rights don't need management.
But what we're really anxious to know is: how does it smell?
If you want to know how to correctly pronounce Huygens, go to this web site.
check with #space on irc.freenode.net to know when this really is confirmed.
Y
no sig.
Man, you've got some strange sexual tastes.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
How dare you smite down our righteous cause? We are about to start a campaign to have the sun shutdown, due to HARMFUL rays which it sends out into space and earth, and to have DI-HYDROGEN-MONOXIDE BANNED. Also, we feel that it would be a prudent move to restrict movement of butterflies in Papua New Guinea, as they might cause hurricanes.
Where's my plastic bubble?
...this guy said: "While NASA's Cassini works flawlessly, the ESA's Huygens probe will deliver superior science just like Beagle. It, too, will fail."
You know who you are...
Did he inhale?
Wake me up when we can "hear" a planet in Dolby Digital EX or DTS surround. These phonograph recordings just don't do it for me anymore.
Though, I suppose it is still better than sitting in a box making a hissing sound pretending I am on a distant planet.
I can't wait to get a load of some methane titties.
Why oh why did we have to do this? We put our Earth microbes contaminated landing craft on Titan, and no one thought of the effect this would have on the Titans?
Did no one ever read the "War of the Worlds"? We have surely wiped out their kind forever! Couldn't we just stay home and trash our own planet? Oh the horror, the horror!
On the bright side, cool pics are expected!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Wow, that was expensive for so little data. So now Huygens is just a very expensive popcicle?
Bloop.
gurgle.
gurgle.
Zzzzztt!
We might find that the atmosphere extends from the surface on upward?!
At long last, through the distance and cloud-cover, the ultimate question shall finally be answered...
thankyouverymuch,you'vebeenawonderfulaudience,thaA feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And NEAR's landing on Eros? Or does it not count?
Or does this seem like a colossal waste for a few hours of data. If I read it correctly the probe will gather a few hours of data (if they are lucky) and stream it back to the Cassini orbiter which beams it back to earth and then after Cassini goes on about it's way and the probe is left on the surface stream data, that no one is listening to, till it dies????
Would it have been that much more money to inlcude a small orbiter that would relay the probes data back, so if lives a few days, we would get that much more data back???
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Projects like this drive technology and that makes the quality of life on this planet better. Sure there may be a more efficient way to spend this money, but the space program is not a waste. Space age technologies are applied to agriculture, climatology and energy production. All things third world countries can use improvements on.
Besides, just try and tell me how the people of Indonesia would be better off without Velcro and Tang?
-dynamo
I always like the "artists rendering" pictures they show, where it's these great chasms and rocks and stuff...i wish they would really take some artistic liberties and show little aliens coming out to greet the probe
> I feel that it is because we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of
> danger
Do you have any proof for this? Your post reads like some rambling blog entry. You seem to be extrapolating something which isn't happening (people being too scared to experiment) from a few people ("stupid hippies", apparantly, whatever they are) who apparantly raised concerns over radioactive contamination. (It certainly would be the worlds more expensive "dirty bomb".)
Don't forget Poland!
Try again. There are two reasons space exploration stagnated: war and money. We had great plans once, but between tax cuts and lack of commercial reason to explore there just isn't money to move quickly.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I feel that it is because we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger.
A couple of questions here. I'm sure you're aware that plutonium is highly radioactive and among the most lethal toxic substances known to man. Lets agree that it's bad stuff to let loose in the environment. So the question is one of risk mittigation and management. Are the scientific gains from launching RTG powered probes throughout the solar system worth the risk of plutonium contamination due to a launch disaster? Launch failures occurr pretty regularly, so we know that regular use of RTG technology in space probes will mean environmental contamination at some point. So how bad would one failure be? How about two? Five? Good questions worth debating. Or do you argue that only "stupid hippies" concern themselves with risk management?
Please note that risking the lives of a space capsule full of men, who take on that risk willingly, is quite different from risking civilians without their knowledge or consent. --M
Here
Clearly, that's a mammilian trait!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Get out and do something.
Science and Exploration is something everyone can be involved in. Study the images publicly available, learn the equipment, apply for the jobs and volunteer to assist.
The only way science will cease to exist is if you look to place blame on people not accepting risk or being hippies.
The only person to blame for your poor views on science and exploration are yourself.
Hippies or not, its dangerous to launch nukes into the atmosphere - you don't risk your own civilization to benefit science.
If Clarke is free to change his story around between Saturn and Jupiter to suit his fancy, I think we can let our jokes float around the same.
Huygens now sits on Titan, silent forever
Will anyone, or anything, ever see it again. This expensive contraption sits silently on the surface of a frozen moon, billions of miles away, while we move on with our everyday activities. Kind-of surreal.
iamchaos
In Soviet Russia Cassini probes You !!!
Now that we have dispensed with the formalities CAN WE HAVE SOME PHOTOS PLEASE???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
16:20 First data received from Huygens probe
15:26 Confirmation received that Huygens probe data was successfully communicated to the Cassini spacecraft
15:00 First Huygens probe data expected at around 16:00
Probe life has now been over 5 hours
14:10 Playback of probe data begins
Ground control confirms that a signal is still being received on Earth from the Huygens probe, suggesting its batteries lasted well beyond the minimum design limit of 2 hours 15 minutes
13:47 Cassini Orbiter has been turned in its orbit to poin the high gain antenna towards Earth
12:30 Confirmation given of signal tracking for at least 2 hours
11:24 Estimated time of surface impact and end of the descent phase
11:23 Descent lamp activated to provide ground reflectivity measurements
11:12 Cassini spacecraft undergoes closest approach to Titan passing at an altitude of 60 000 km at a speed of 5.4 km per second
10:30 Green Bank 110 m telescope confirms a carrier signal from the Huygens probe.
Signal indicates that the probe has survived the entry phase and that the instrument payload is active.
Quick,
Sell your computer and donate the proceeds to the starving and homeless!
dumbass
Since we're dealing with Titan, we wouldn't want him hooking up with Isaac again, now would we?
Your post reads like some rambling blog entry.
/.
Actually, it is his blog entry. See the guy's webpage: www.jamesbrief.com. He just cut and pasted something he had already written into a comment and let loose. Of course since it insulted a disliked group, hippies, instead of offering a rational argument, it gained a +5 forthwith. Welcome to
Huygens is not sitting on Titan silently. It's SCREAMING! Oh god it burns it burns! Muhahahaha.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It is being reported that they have on the ground station more than 2 hours worth of data after huygens touched down ( presumably including all the data it collected on the way down ). I think they need to process this data before we can start to see just what Huygens was experiencing.
This looks like a total success for the team and everyone involved. Nice one.
"I knew I should've taken a left at Albuquerque!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
silent forever
forever is a very long time...
MORTAR COMBAT!
Titan sounds like Ashlee Simpson?
Time to bomb it!
because ther are too many people there and thinning them out woud be an advanrtage...
dont make me tell the President that your country might have WMD's....
hey pres! I think they have WMD's over there... let's go "look"
besides, is it so bad that a tribe of bipolar backward wierdows on that little islan were wiped out? they hated people and lived like animals... it's simply natures way of getting rid of the weaker creatures.
To relay NASA TV through peercast, or something like that?
It's pretty much slashdotted, I'm getting video in little 3 second chunks.
Any other way to view this bidness with the spacemen and the glayven attempt no landiiiings.?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They're not all stupid. I think Michio Kaku, one of the better known physics writers was on board with them.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
He is to easily missed at 0 and is informative
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
To hold you up until the first lander pictures are in, here's every image ever taken of Titan by NASA probes.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
"Ovaltine? A crummy commercial? Son of a b**ch!"
Yes, I agree, and what I find most frustrating is that the explorers are as willing and bold as ever to go on these missions, even given the dangers.
I think this problem will remain until private space travelling get cheap enough. That's why I saw the SpaceshipOne as a milestone in space travelling. Not because that much was accomplished exploration-wise, they barely exited the atmosphere, but because what they accomplished is a prerequisite to be able to explore even if suffering losses.
The whole idea with explorers not funding the research just don't work in the long term, it seems. At least as long as they don't realise it's hard to accomplish something in a field you have little, if any, experience in. Once you gain it though, you can start accomplishing the real amazing feats.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Scared people like this, afraid to take chances are what almost kept us from everything glorious we're learning today and everything we will learn from Cassini tomorrow. And most scary, these people and all others who are afraid of taking chances have kept us from learning from all the cancelled missions and missions that will never be in the future because it's always "better safe than sorry" to them.
Since you're so keen on taking risks to help humanity, why don't you sign up for some high-risk medical research. There's a chance it will make you sick, but as far as you're concerned, it's for the greater good. Your impact on the well-being of other people would be immeadiate and significant.
There's a reason most people don't want to sacrifice lives for space exploration -- in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that important. We'll get there pretty soon anyways, so I don't see why lives need to be sacrificed to speed things up.
Maybe people who want to raise awareness of the danger posed by satellites carrying plutonium are hippies to you, but I think they have a pretty good point. If nobody cared about it, there wouldn't be any pressure on space agencies to take precautions. Nuclear satellites have crashed before -- we're lucky that they landed in uninhabited areas.
...forget about getting any play from the *females* in the Huygens team.
Or from any Martians.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I'm willing to point out that the exploration by the Europeans of previously unknown areas had a much lower barrier for entry than space exploration.
Sure, we're much more technologically advanced and wealthier, but all you needed back then were a ship, some sailors, a navigator, some supplies, and off you went. It didn't cost the large amounts of money (even accounting for inflation and so forth) that it takes to fund a space program.
The European explorers didn't need to take oxygen with them, and they needed to make stops to find fresh food and water. They didn't usually carry everything they would need for the whole voyage. Also, it didn't take seven years to get to their destination (without resupply) like it takes us to get to Saturn. They were also able to set up colonies in places that had the things they needed to survive.
I certainly agree with you that one shouldn't be overly risk-averse in exploring space: people will die exploring. There have been a number of unnecessary wimp-outs every time something bad happens (NASA, I'm looking at you). I think the Chinese will do pretty well in this area, as they have shown themselves willing to accept losses if it leads to a national goal. However, I think risk-aversion is more of a secondary factor in our lack of progress.
The primary factor is that relatively few can play the exploration game when it comes to space. Only a few governments have gotten involved, whereas back in the 1500's and 1600's, there were a lot of smaller private ventures, hoping to gain profits off of gold, spices, and other trade.
I think that once private companies are able to reach space and find something profitable, then space exploration will do much better. It will still be a while, I think. The main problem is the huge amounts of money it takes, and the need to find profit in order to pay for it all. I don't expect any colonies on other planets in my lifetime (and I'm in my 20's).
No, it's because there isn't anything out there that we can't get much, much cheaper here on Earth. Metals, minerals, lebensraum, you name it. The rewards just aren't there.
We also happened to reach the plateau in technology in the 1960s. Much like the airliners: how different is the Airbus A380 really from Boeing 747 developed in the 60s? Sure it's much more sophisticated but have the speed, range, altitude ceiling or even cost of operation improved anywhere near order of magnitude? No, and chemical rockets have the same problem.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
> Actually, it is his blog entry. See the guy's webpage: www.jamesbrief.com.
Maybe later.
Here's an explanation of what descent pictures will be taken: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/pia07229.html/
close. I wrote the slashdot entry first and then posted it to my site afterwards.
Here's the proof.
h_cassini_nowwhat_2,1.jpg
h_cassini_nowwhat,0.jpg
How do fix a problem in firmware that's going to dump the data from the Huygens probe? Boris Smeds, uber geek 2005 knows how.
i was watching that :(
Typical. They spend all that effort establishing a link between Titan's surface and Earth, and most of the bandwidth is used too transmit Titanic pr0n. Hooray for communications.
See -- I told you where was a robot God!
this afternoon in a US timezone or over in Europe?
Does anyone know if they do have a plan to try to pick up more data from Huygens if it's still somehow alive when Cassini comes back over the horizon?
Scientists are holding tight whether they good telemetry from the probe. The ESA designers forgot to correct for the doppler shift of the changing velocity between the Huygens probe and the Cassini mother ship. There is a chance that some of the signal could shift outside of the attenna frequency range and be lost. The landing was changed to slower trajectory orbit to hopefully compensate.
I could read your message at a glance. 00100000 is 32 (a space).. the rest is obvious
Try Prozac, maybe show tunes, might cheer you up.
How about this for a third reason: because it's there. Humans explore - it's in our genes.
It's f'ing cold up here.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Indonesia doesn't want our help.
Hey, if we could send the poor and the children to Titan, we would.
--- Ban humanity.
\That's no moon...\
Er. Wait. Yes it is. Nevermind.
I wouldn't use Kaku's actions as an indicator of intelligence. I've meet the man on many occasions and shameless self-promotion seems to be his modus operandi.
"(It certainly would be the worlds more expensive "dirty bomb".)"
The threat of contamination is very, very low. The technology has been used several times over the last 3 decades and as mentioned in the first link, there was an accident and the fuel source was recovered intact and used in another mission.
http://www.nuclearspace.com/facts_about_rtg.htm
http://www.ne.doe.gov/space/spacepwr.html
Personally, i think people in general have forgotten about what was required to found the new worlds of the past, new exotic conditions, sickness, disease, and death were all part of the equation and they were hailed as heroes. Now it seems that you're condisered stupid to take on a challenge that could result in death, even something as important as exploring the rest of our solar system and beyond. Where is America's (and the world's) cowboy attitude of old? I kinda liked it and it sure would speed up our already exponential increase in knowledge about the rest of the cosmos.
IANALOOA
...my mind is going. I can feel it...
"It stinks!"
Great works guys, I hope the data is worth it!
I think "Good Morning America" needs to hire new science advisors. I walked out of my bedroom this morning to hear "The Cassini spacecraft has successfully begun its descent into Titan". That would have been bad, very bad...
Unlike the above, I get the joke.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
the mp3 on that page is hillarious!!!! :))
I for one am one of the few who would put my life on the line to explore the cosmos. Because I consider living on Earth as much if not more dangerous.
Not many people have a sense of adventure today. It's sad, because without a vision of something greater than what we are, society will not grow very slowly if at all. We'll get bored and take over other countries for thier oil basically.
Somebody tell the natives to hide.
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
Finally, a news release from ESA:0 .html
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQ1QQ3K3E_index_
Some say the glass is half empty.
Some say the glass is half full.
An engineer says the glass has a safety factor of 2.
someone please post a listing of recent missions, where ESA was not involved in any way.
gee. whats wrong with you? a nice mission, good cooperation, good science. who cares, if its got NASA, ESA or CowboyNeal stamped on it?
The results will be available to everyone.
Speaking of 1 in 100,000 odds, that's about the risk that space science faces due to anti-Pu Activists.
Now, alongside Cassini, put up your 'settling the world=genocide' pre-emptive denial, and toss in Love Canal, Bhopal, TMI, and Chernyobl, or any other man-made disasters that come to mind.
Every risk deserves attention. Ethics and economics are a scary combination. I'm as cynical as the next guy about whether lawyers are worth the grief they cause, yet I get really nervous about calls for lawsuit limits due to it's risk of making product liability an economic calculation (I don't ever want to hear a business argument of "we will make $X million profit per anticipated casualty, and lawsuits are cost-limited to $250k in damages, each").
I'll conceed we're cushy enough that we seem to have become a nation of scaredy-cats. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave has become Land of the Safe, Home of the Timid. I agree that the risk of a Pu event due to Cassini was tiny. And I was eager to see Cassini's opposition lose. But I'm glad that people stood up in opposition. The questions need to be asked, answered, debated. And the risks we face need to include utter bankruptcy and disgrace if we disregard risks and our actions kill bystanders. Sometimes the level of responsibility should literally be harsher than just being 'willing to die', whether for commerce or knowledge.
As anyone who studies risk analysis knows, just because the odds are miniscule, doesn't mean the damage still wouldn't be terrible if something goes horribly wrong, and we should never hide from that discussion. Ethically, we literally need to promote the review of these serious (albeit tiny) risks. We can't brush them aside. Not while asking bystanders to die if we screw up.
Please don't talk trash about people that are just trying to keep our decisions humane.
Oh, and (Mayflower - Columbus) = 128. Columbus: 1492. Mayflower: 1620. 128 *YEARS* between 'em. And the costs, complexities, etc... they're too different to compare simplistically.
This converter works okay http://www.sitinthecorner.com/binary/binary.php/
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Oh, cry me a river. Except they are crocodile tears for Nasa's 2005 budget has actually increased by 6% - for a total of $16.2 BILLION dollars.
I think anyone would agree that is a healthy chunk of money.
How can you say space exploration has stagnated when we are about to try and go to Mars, we just launched a comet impacting satellite yesterday, and we have two frisky rovers rambling about on mars looking at shiny metal objects? How can you say space exploration has stagnated when we have two very rich people trying to start private space programs? Long term THAT is going to bring real space exploration.
Seems to me that all things considered SPace exploration is doing pretty well, and it's just your mood that has stagnated.
Yeah it would be cool to have more money devoted to space but here's a little secret - if we were not in a war NASA would probably not get a penny more, instead some expensive construction project would be started in a powerful senitors home state.
You always have to remember when thinking about a government program that they are INDEPENDANT - shutting down any given program elsewhere is not going to automatically give more money to the program you like.
So keep crying while the rest of us excitedly follow the developments of various ongoing space missions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And someone here may have some insight. When a probe like this lands:
1) How big are the antennas it uses to send (do they fold out?)
2) Where does it get the power to transmit? (Solar?)
3) Does NASA have some giant antenna array somewhere that receives this stuff? (That they're steaing time from SETI to do this stuff?)
4) How does it know which way Earth is, so it knows where to point the antena? It is celestial, like ICBMs?
Sorry - I don't usually post a bunch of questions, but I've read a couple of articles on this, and they haven't been talking about this kind of stuff. Google might have something, but knowing the crowd here, someone actually WORKS on this stuff... =) 2.2 billion miles is an awful long way...I'm kind of surprised the trasmissions make it so well.
Oh, and if radio travels at the speed of light, how long does it take does it take to get here?
2.2 billion miles = 2,200,000,000
c = ~186,000 miles/s
2,200,000,000/c = 11,828 secs = 197 min = 3.28 hours
Wow!
And there, on a rock, is a sticker saying:
"Gravity is only a theory"
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Don't forget, though, that the 'new world' that was 'discovered' in the 1500s had been visited by lots of people for a long time previous.
Go to certain parts of eastern Canada sometime, for example, and you'll find Viking burial grounds.
There are theories that the Americas had been visitied by Phonecians, Egyptions, ancient Chinese, all sorts of pre-European civilizations.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
yeah at least this one didn't blow up on the surface already. though.. we don't know for sure.
hey, the space race is over. youve won. now lets do some science.
The probe was designed to float, so landing in an ocean wouldn't be a problem.
No, you miss my point. I'm well aware that people were protesting against it, I'm just puzzled as to why you think "we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger.", rather than simply "cautious about potentially causing expensive and harmful accidents".
You say "Space travel has not progressed like it should have" but perhaps you could explain how it "should" have progressed, specifically with regard to the extra risks "we" could have taken and their potential pay-offs.
When I said I was hoping to see pictures of beasts, it was because it would be fascinating to see life-forms on Titan, not because I wanted to have sex with them. It's your immagination that's stranage, not my sexual tastes.
In Soviet Russia, Titan lands on Huygens.
I, for one, welcome our new Titanian overlords.
Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Huygenses!
Any transmission problems are clearly Micro$oft's fault. Damn Windows! The ESA should have used Linux!
Any transmission problems are clearly NASA's screw-up, forgetting to use the Metric system.
Let's see, what else have I forgotten...
...and then the transmission cuts off.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Images from Huygens should start to be released in a couple of hours. Look for them to show up here: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/
That sounds about as likely as someone messing up their metric/Imperial units? What would the public perception have been if Cassini had passed Earth 2 months *after* the Mars Climate Orbiter missed, sorry, hit, rather than vice versa?
//Received transmission:
s [i], 2));
String s = "01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100001";
//Decode
//Expected: All your base are belong to us!
String binStrings[] = s.split("\\s");
for (int i = 0; i < binStrings.length; i++) {
System.out.print((char)Integer.parseInt(binString
}
/* Mission Success! Billions of dollars well spent on interplanetary less-than-instant text message. */
System.exit();
Good question. Here's what I dug-up (hey's it's Friday and I don't feel like taking a chance on breaking anything):The orginal 747 was $21 million in 1970 dollars, so we can see, after accounting for inflation, that manufacturing costs have improved, but that's about it.
For three generations, government schools have been drilling into children how awful and evil atomic energy is.
Why do you act surprised that there is foul fruit to this effort to discredit clean, efficient atomics?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Wow, I'm really excited! I get to see pictures from another world! Woohoo! Now, I believe the next stop is Europa... It apparently has a lot of Early Earth-Like organic compound mixtures, and quite possibly, liquid water. It will be worthwhile to see that Europa holds - possibly life?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Speak for yourself, there's not much spare room for exploration in my jeans.
Beware blue cats moving at
I'm glad I'm neither Republican nor Democrat but at least I'm not a dick! :)
I think Venus could use some more study too. The russian landers managed to take some pictures , but I'd like to see some more of Venus.
Maybe with today's tech we could make landers that last longer and maybe get a rover out of the deal, though it probably couldn't last as long as Spirit and Opportunity.
"All the worlds are your's except... wait... this isn't Europa?"
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
The exploration of the New World was driven by a fairly immediate payoff. They were expecting gold and silver, and they got it (largely by stealing it, but that's besides the point.)
They were also expecting a new trade route for the valuable spice trade, which they didn't get, but they found a bunch of other valuable products essentially immediately: Columbus found tobacco on his first voyage.
Space has all sorts of potential payoffs, but they don't turn an immediate profit on the billions of dollars required to get there. By contrast, funding a misison to the New World was basically printing money. It's a lot easier to fund low-risk ventures than high-risk ones.
The space race of the 1960s wasn't driven by profit motive but by a political situation. It was more like the Olympics than exploration; they didn't even send a scientist on Apollo until late in the mission. It was glorious, but once we reached the moon the public stopped caring so they stopped funding it.
No profit + no glory = no space exploration. It sucks. In contrast, the hippies play a very small role.
And where was this plutonium before it was put in spacecraft?
On the Earth.
Um, no. Plutonium has too short a half-life to exist naturally. It has to be produced in nuclear reactors.Everything dangerous we play with is just stuff we found already existing in nature.
Like guns and knives and tactical nuclear weapons, you mean?
or is twice the size it needs to be.
fail sagfes are all good, but rember when we are talking about sending a probe out, ever gram matters
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
What's a stupid hippy to do?
You get thrown out of stand up comedy clubs all the time, don't you?
I SAID "EN TEEE" !!!!!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
You know what it all boils down to? War and pr0n. That's right, if you think about it, tons of great innovations derrive from war and pr0n. To name a few:
:)).
War:
Jet engines, rockets, internet, satellites, radar, gps, nuclear power.
pr0n:
VHS, DVD, internet technologies (compression, p2p, etc.), blue-ray (HD pr0n anyone
!hoD
The online CNN poll, albeit very unscientific, shows that 33% of respondents think the Huygens Probe was a waste of money.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Plutonium has an atomic number of 94 and an atomic weight of 244. It is one of the most delicate elements in the periodic table. The only thing (up to now) that has saved it from becoming extinct is that it is difficult to locate.
The plutonium atom is so delicate that a fall (in Earth's gravity) of a distance of 10cm onto a hard surface will cause a plutonium atom to be broken into 3 iron atoms, one sulphur atom, and a number of neutrons. Plutonium is commonly found in the stink bombs that kids throw in the hallway at school.
...you realise the original post didn't specify the moons of Jupiter, right? ALL the moons means ALL the moons, yeah? Like, every one of them? Anywhere? I'd stick to assuming it just means all the moons in our solar system if it was me, but y'know, each to his own.
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
You want to send balloons to Venus, not rovers.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Here's a listing of recent nasa Missions. Nasa does a lot more than the press regularly lets us know about...
The weather report for the descent called for "Cloudy". I can't wait to see the pictures of those clouds!
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
"Educated" and "smart" form a two-dimensional orthogonal basis. Kaku is living proof of that.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
TITAN ROVER MISSION!
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
I'd like to point out again that Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is running a blog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. The blog is being updated as events happen.
...
I particularly enjoyed this quote from the blog:
He [John Zarnecki, the PI on the Surface Science Package] also said that it looks like the probe lasted about 147 minutes, which is 12 minutes longer than the predicted 135, but is "well within the error bars" of the predictions. However, he said this was still an early result--he didn't want to say for certain, because the members of a team had a bet on, and the number "looked suspiciously like the one I picked," Zarnecki said.
But, when pushed, scientists can't help doing just a little bit of speculating. That's how they work. So here are a couple of little initial tidbits of speculative potential facts that they have mentioned.
Number 1: Since the probe lasted for a really long time, it's "probably a good conclusion" that the probe landed on a solid, not a liquid surface, Lebreton said when he was pushed. Of course, that doesn't rule out John Zarnecki's "squelchy" surface prediction.
Number 2: One thing that may have helped the probe last a long time was that it appeared to stay unexpectedly warm. At an elevation of only 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) above the surface, her interior was still at a balmy 25 C (77 F), despite the outside temperature being a frigid -180 C (-290 F). Lebreton wasn't ready to say what this might mean. It could be overperformance of the spacecraft, but it could also mean a wide variety of unexpected things about the atmosphere. For those of you who like instant results, I think you'll be disappointed on an answer to this question, because after all Huygens was a mission focused almost entirely on Titan's atmosphere, so it's going to take a very long time to synthesize scientific conclusions from all of this.
Come on mod's, you can't detect a troll when you see one? Mod parent down!
DI-HYDROGEN-MONOXIDE
I heard that it is the main ingredient of vomit and it makes you pee and sweat!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
One has to remember that the vast majority of exploration to the "New World" was motivated by the lure of gold and other riches, the competition from hostile neighbours and the promise of military dominance in the region. Discovering riches on other planets would most certainly change our approach, and we'd have the glorious and uncautious golden age of exploration that you yearn for.
>Nasa does a lot more
:)
absolutely.
well, while not very extensive, most missions do get mentioned here in, er, germany, one way or another.
we still got joachim "the joe" bublath.
Your argument might have some weight if Huygens had any chance whatsoever of discovering something relevant to humans.
What a fucking boondoggle.
Crap, I'm an idiot and forgot the actual blog link. Here you go:
http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html
NasaTV was reporting they were also collecting signals directly from the probe via listneing stations on earth - so possibly if the battery lasts long enough they could get a little more out of it when it faces earth again (not sure when that is).
They were already able to learn a little bit through just the doppler shift from the signal (wind speed).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you have access to a multicast enabled network on Internet 2, NASA TV is being re-broadcast by the University of Oregon. You can play it with VLC, Quicktime or IP/TV and probably others.
.sdp you can open it with Quicktime and watch the multicast stream (if you have access to it). Ignore Word wrap on the 4th line (its one single line)
u dio 28848/1 RTP/AVP 14 0 96 3 5 97 98 99 100 101 102 10 11 103 104 105 106
Look at the SAP Announcements for the correct address. If you save the following information below the line to a text file and give it the extention of
v=0
o=- 61585 3 IN IP4 128.223.83.33
s=NASA TV (MPEG-1)
i=NASA television in MPEG-1 format, provided by the University of Oregon. Please contact the UO if you have problems with this feed.
e=Hans Kuhn <multicast@lists.uoregon.edu>
p=Hans Kuhn <541/346-1758>
b=AS:1000
t=0 0
a=cat:2
a=tool:IP/TV Content Manager 3.4.14
a=type:broadcast
m=video 54302/1 RTP/AVP 32 31 96 97
c=IN IP4 224.2.231.45/127
a=fmtp:32 type=mpeg1
a=x-iptv-svr:video 128.223.91.191 live
a=rtpmap:96 WBIH/90000
a=rtpmap:97 MP4V-ES/90000
a=framerate:30.0
a=quality:8
m=a
c=IN IP4 224.2.145.37/127
a=x-iptv-svr:audio 128.223.91.191 live
a=rtpmap:96 X-WAVE/8000
a=rtpmap:97 L8/8000/2
a=rtpmap:98 L8/8000
a=rtpmap:99 L8/22050/2
a=rtpmap:100 L8/22050
a=rtpmap:101 L8/11025/2
a=rtpmap:102 L8/11025
a=rtpmap:103 L16/22050/2
a=rtpmap:104 L16/22050
a=rtpmap:105 L16/11025/2
a=rtpmap:106 L16/11025
People might want to know where they can read this blog - the address is here.
Thanks for the info though I did not know the blog existed, and it's always fun to get more intimate details than news reports or press releases can provide.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
nked and petrified huygens covered in hot grits?
A very stupid question but I thought I'd ask it anyway. How long does it take for an electromagnetic signal from Huygens to come to Earth?!
This just in...They just found Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis living in a van down by the river....a River on Titan!!!
The first image was just shown. RIVERS! Channels running down to the shore of a body of liquid.
AWESOME!
damn, she's both good looking and a geek! i think i am in love ; )
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Interesting thought:
Forever is a very long time for Huygens to stay sat on Titan's surface undisturbed.
I wonder when (if ever) it will be touched by a living being again, and by who/what?
Obvious rivers of ....something!!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.h tml
"The first image shows what appear to be drainage channels flowing to a possible shoreline"
from http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/status.html
Here there is the first image!!!
h tml/
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.h tml
Hmmmm...FASCInating.
See http://www.urania.be/images/nieuws/titan1.jpg
the first images and data is being received and processed by human minds
wavefunctions are collapsing across Titan
what if there are sentient beings that exist in uncollapsed clods of eigenstates???
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
...ignore what you hear on that web site. It only applies to Dutch people.
It's easy to modify the pure Dutch pronunciation to something Americans (for instance) can handle.
Pronounce it "how-hunts" (just changing the sounds we don't normally make in English into the closest equivalents). This is easy to remember, almost correct, and it's how we deal with most foreign names and words. How do you pronounce the name of the composer "Chopin"? You'll look like an ass in the US if you either:
1) Say "chop-in"
2) Use a full French accent with the nasal last vowel sound.
Just say "show-pah".
Same thing with Beethoven. We say bay-toe-vin, not beeth-ow-vin; we use an approximation of the actual German pronounciation. Sorry for the all-music examples, that's what came to mind.
There are examples of names that got butchered and stayed that way (Dr. Seuss should rhyme with "joyce"), but usually we end up with a general approximation, and sometimes people change the spelling of their names to make it easier. This happens a lot with Gaelic names, because of the very different use of the alphabet (the name Maeve is normally spelled "Maudbh".. would you pronounce that "mao-duh-buh-huh"?).
Anyone know how Huygens is being pronounced in the news, etc.?
And meantime in the background you could see the raw pictures scrolling by on the overhead monitors...
here!
SpaceflightNow has the first picture from Huygens. (mirror)
http://www.cnn.com/ is showing the first pictures. "Always slow" to respond ESA http://www.esa.int/ do not have any pictures yet up on the site. Nasa tv http://http//www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows .asx/ is showing the pictures intermittently. WHY don't they have these pictures on ESA or NASA website??
- Sh!t
NASA has always been great about getting raw images up quickly on their website. Here we discover that ESA has a few hundred images already processed and nothing on their website..
www.lonseidman.com
I can't wait to see more.
^^vv<><>BA
Its uh... small. And rocky... I need to squint more.
Here are some of the first Images:
Pic 1
Pic 2
See my Home Theater
first picture of the surface of titan can be found at: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMCXM 71Y3E_0.html
Looks solid!
Looks like this is the first image posted by the ESA.
True believers seek redemption from the sin of death.
Here from low altitude below the haze, just released by ESA
"When we get images back from the encounter, they will be posted on this page. But since we won't have any results for a few more days, this page is operational, yet empty. Hopefully, that will change soon."
...while the lander is there for some 3 hours already, maybe under water, maybe in pieces...
Damned light has to be so slow! Just small 3 solar hours away and we have to wait 3 long hours for the data.
As you think about it, the speed of light isn't all that impressive really.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
In the words of poltergeist girl. http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index. html
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
...in which surface of Titan was perfectly smooth.
And the BBC is reporting that 3 floppy's worth of data (I'm guessing 4.5 megs) has been downloaded - much more than they'd expected.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The first image shows what appear to be drainage channels flowing to a possible shoreline, the camera's scientist says."
h tml
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.
Very cool. Wish my seven year old was at work with me to share this science moment with him.
ESA's Huygens home page has posted the first image from the surface. Looks like the Venus surface images from the Russian Venera lander. There are a lot of what look like round river rocks. Maybe they are eroded ice boulders.
Edith Keeler Must Die
balloons have already been sent. rovers haven't.
I am so pissed off right now I can hardly speak!
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
in fact many electronics work better at low temperatures, eg superconductors...
How soon do we find out about the prices for split-crotch panties, etc.?
First the Moon, then Venus, then Mars...
So now that we have what appears to be one aerial photo and one surface photo of Titan I think it's becoming safe to conclude the following:
Most of the available real estate in the solar system is crappy bottom land and even your best plow doesn't stand a chance!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
CNN's Miles O'brien writes on his blog It's a little disappointing we are only seeing one picture so far. ESA is not like NASA -- the agency likes to keep its data close to the vest and does not release images as they stream down -- as we have come to expect from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (in California). Too bad. It is self serving, clearly, but it is always better to share. What do you think?
- Sh!t
She's on a weekly mp3 radio show, too. You can hear her dulcet tones here.
Only on slashdot does a link to a humor post from alt.religion.kibology get modded as "Insightful".
Funny, yes. Insightful?
Did you read the link? Moonbase Alpha? Cancellation of the shuttle program by Jimmy Carter?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/data.htm
Some images are now available here!
Until it gets /.ed anyway, look to be plenty of other mirrors in this thread so hopefully they will get it soon, too. Heres the one on spaceflightnow.
Hearing of it is bad enough. Actaully seeing an image of it is far worse.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Seems to me we got lucky, landed in an estuary. I think the bottom 50% of the pic is a puddle of liquid, with rocks in it. Top 25% looks like rocks to the horizon. Waiting for higher res images...
you had me at #!
Since this is an ESA project, it will send back a Michelin rating.
just released!!!
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMCXM 71Y3E_1.html
Shows runoff channels (like Earth's river drainage systems). Pretty cool though extremely low res at the moment (243 x 159 Pixels).
One point I'd like to bring up: They say this is the first image from Huygens but the title of the file is "landing_03_H.jpg", am I the only one to find this odd?
Be True, Unbeliever
Even pulled one from the JPL Cassini site, though they are showing JPL Cassini images on -their- site.
At the moment, Space Ref still has the censored images.
Remember, Europe is not a free and open society.
The pics are amazing.
We need another expedition there, maybe even a rover. (I know right now this is technically impossible, but still hope).
Check the both here:
http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html
Wow, look at all that weathering. I see lots of creeks and rivers flowing through mountains, hills, and flats to and lakes and/or seas. Those stones look really worn too - lots of smooth round objects on the ground.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I know it is too early to say much, but the first images on Spaceflighnow.com look a lot like mars: rocks and sand/dust. (Maybe there is some liquid, but cannot tell yet from early images.) Mars, Venus, Moon, and Titan's surface looks pretty much the same: rocks and dirt. Then again, if you randomly picked a place on Earth, it would probably look like that too (if not in water). Titan may very well have it's own Yosemite Valley somewhere else on its surface.
But the rocks do look pretty darn round. Probably a lot of weathering or liquid flow. I have not really seen rocks that round on the other mentioned bodies (except the BB-sized "blueberries" on Mars).
Table-ized A.I.
Please mods, next time look at the timestamp of the posting before modding redundant.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I realize this is just raw data, but I'm surprised at how small the photos are, such low resolution.
I wonder if this is a function of the bandwidth that was available for transmission, or if they just couldn't use hi-res cameras for some reason?
Go here for a lot of Raw pics. There are at least 500 images here, I'd say. A lot of the images are very similar, and a lot are not very pretty to the eyes (hazy and blurry). I did notice some slight differences between the "at first glance identical" pics as I went through them in a slideshow viewer. http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/jpeg/
Not unlike Mars...
More here!
I study astrophysics and a while ago I sat through an interesting lecture by Mike Garrett who is using lotsa computer power and a few big radio telescopes to look for the Huygens probe. They were a back up in case the signal from Huygens could not reach Cassini because the antennae --or electronics, don't quite remember-- weren't designed properly. (As in they forgot about Doppler shifts associated with the relative motion of the two spacecrafts.) They hope to reconstruct Huygen's path through the atmosphere of Titan really precisely and thus be able to for instance reconstruct wind conditions. Some googling found me: http://www.atlasaerospace.net/eng/newsi-r.htm?id=1 849, I'm sure there's more info.
you can find a collection of pictures of this event @
e
http://www.justinrossetti.com/gallery/HuygensProb
you can also add pictures yourself.
Check out this picture and caption. It has to be the best picture and caption from a space mission. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/pia05423.html
You thought that was a troll?
Have you read the moderation guidelines - did you just finish high school chemistry and are eager to apply your knowledge of the periodic table?
It was kooky nonsense, not a troll! You probably hate the Three Stooges!
Plutonium has an atomic number of 94 and an atomic weight of 244. It is one of the most delicate elements in the periodic table. The only thing (up to now) that has saved it from becoming extinct is that it is difficult to locate. The plutonium atom is so delicate that a fall (in Earth's gravity) of a distance of 10cm onto a hard surface will cause a plutonium atom to be broken into 3 iron atoms, one sulphur atom, and a number of neutrons. Plutonium is commonly found in the stink bombs that kids throw in the hallway at school.
Very funny. NOT!
...Being Dutch, I know that this is a very difficult one to pronounce; it has two phonemes right next to each other that are very difficult for English natives: the "uy" (an old-fashioned way of writing the vowel "ui") and the hard guttoral g.
The "ui" has no real corresponding sound in English. Something that seems to come reasonably close (and that's actually pronounceable by English natives ;) is "o-e-i" (see http://www.ultrasw.com/pawlowski/brendan/Dutch.htm l)
The "g": Most of the speakers in the mp3 are "from above the big rivers", as we say in The Netherlands; roughly, in the North of the Netherlands, the "g" is pronouced something like the "ch" in the Schottisch "loch", or like the Arab gutteral g (some say that the gutteral g is an influence from Yiddish; there were (and are) lots of Jews in the trade-rich western part of the People from "below the big rivers" (actually the Rhine-Schelde-Meusse delta) have a much softer "g" (which we actually call a "soft g" in Dutch).
Now, when you're done pronouncing "Huygens", try "Koeieuier" sometimes (or "Angstschreeuw" for that matter ;)
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Pictures from the surface of Titan
Have you read the moderator guidelines?
Current headline from Google News:
"ABC News Probe Lands on Saturn Moon; Sends Photos"
They either forgot a colon in there, or the ESA just got bought out.
Cue The Sun...
I thought the killer butterfly was in Paris. Shit, you mean I have to watch out for other butterflies too! I mean Mothra goes without saying, but still . . . . others!?!
Debates? You must be new here.
We only throw rotten eggs at eachother and hope that the moderators like our rotten eggs better then the other guy's.
Emily is hot.
He's probably already blowing up and distorting the images and planning out how he's going to label these rocks as tools, electronics, and a small-block chevy engine ESA and NASA are hiding from us. Rest assures he'll be telling us how these pics show evidence of life within two weeks....friggin snakeoil salesman.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
This worked for a while, but now all you get is 404's. This had a LOT more than three pictures, including a cool shot of the horizon, and a few of those ice block/stones photos.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Huygens' signal is extremely faint. It has the power of a mobile telephone and it is 1.4 billion kilometers from the Earth.
If I'm only 3 km from the Vodafone cell base station, why do I have problems getting signal?!
> perl -e 'foreach (@ARGV) { print pack("B*", $_);} print "\n"; ' 01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100001
All your base are belong to us!
>
+5, Funny.
Just for the record - for those who don't know about it, tentacles are a rather popular part of Japanese anime porn.
perl -pe 's/([01]{8} ?)/chr ord pack('B8',$1)/ge' binary.txt
I could understand if they just didn't have the time to put up the pictures yet, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. NASA had some of the pictures up on their website a little while ago, and the ESA made them take the pics off.
So it seems that they don't have time to put the pictures up on their site, but somehow they do have the time to tell those who already did post the pics to take them down.
you had me at #!
I mean it.
Yes, it's my attempt at humour!
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
The Huygens probe was saved from probable failure, due to the inability of Cassini's receiver to compensate for the doppler effect:
Titan Calling How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon (by James Oberg)
Without this guy, things would have gone a lot differently! I found this article in RISKS digest 23.65 (always worth a read).
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
Anyone else using the Family Portrait as their desktop background?
I'm going to cry if they get a picture of Saturn ascending over the horizon.
No, it's because there isn't anything out there that we can't get much, much cheaper here on Earth. Metals, minerals, lebensraum, you name it.
One thing we can get in space that we can't get on Earth - reliable, detailed, scientific data about the solar system, and other comic phenomenon. So, the one thing that is worthwhile to go out and get is scientific information. And that's the one thing we are getting with missions like Huygens/Cassini.
I hope you'll take this as the exception that proves your point.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Two photos made it back at the time of this posting. Only rocks, but fluid eroded.
...Expired while the unwed idiot mothers on welfare were breeding without limit in the last few decades.
/. are the ones keeping things running, and , even if we're short a clue, know where to find one.
We now have warning labels on Pop-Tarts to keep these people from hurting themselves by finding out that something that just came out of the toaster is HOT.
You just haven't noticed that the average person-on -the-street is even stupider than the ones you see on Leno's 'Jaywalking' segment, Because most of us here on
I read "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth when I was young, and thought it was farfetched. I realized recently that we are now living it.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
He says no such thing. Read the username.
Sleep is futile.
...But sounded too sensible to the idiot with mod points....
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
That certainly seems to be the consensus. :)
Those darkish rivers and that ocean may prove to be rich in hydrocarbons. This little probe may fire up the debate over abiogenic petroleum. Unless, of course, they had a lot of dinosaurs stomping around up there at some point.
Only the U.S. Government could take the most exciting subject ever -- space exploration -- and make it boring!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
People perceive risk in different ways. A Cassini accident had the potential to affect everyone, so everyone should have their say about whether the risk is worth taking. Make your own observations about the risk... if they're solid, people will know it. But nobody is arguing about the facts, so don't try to denigrate someone else for exercising their right to interpret them differently.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Boris Smeds should be a serious contender for the physics prize.
Better somebody who applies real physics to detecting and solving a problem and thus turning around the otherwise doomed delivery of irreplaceable data, than the plague of theoreticians who lack the courage to look outside the shadow cast by overrated hundred year old suppositions and the false god of mathematical elegance.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Great story. The class of Apollo 13 :)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
first voice. Does not pronounce the "g" of Huygens right, it's too hard. In Dutch the "g" should have a tone, while the "ch" is toneless. She pronounces the "g" as a "ch".
Also she mispronounces de "eeuw" sound in Leeuwenhoek. But compared to voice #2 and #4 she's isn't that bad.
I don't know exactly where that dialect is from.
second voice. Clearly from around Amsterdam, very bad accent. People from Amsterdam pronounce consonants much too hard, saying "fan Lefenhoek" in stead of "van Leeuwenhoek". Also the last syllable (how the hell do you spell that) of "Huygens" should be like the last vowels in "vegetable". She pronounces (as most people from around Amsterdam) it too much as "Huygans", with an "a" as in "clerk". Anyway, she sounds terribly.
third voice. She is pronouncing both names right. Although, as someone has noticed, the pronouncation of the "g" is from above the rivers. But the much softer "g" from below the rivers is a deviation.
fourth voice. She must have been very nervous, as she pronounces the names as no one from the Netherlands would pronounce it.
This page has some raw images from the Huygens probe descent onto Titan:
http://spacescience.ca/titan/raw/
This page has the images in more of a gallery format:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/file1.html
It should be interesting to try doing different sorts of processing on them, like panoramas, contrast-corrected animations, etc. The individual images are triplets, composed of the three camera views.
So you TRUST the government?
exploring the solar system, sending probes, taking pictures, and what do we find out? God loves rocks.
podom
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
A jaw and a mouth. Look at the pictures.
...but I didn't find it after reading the 40 highest-rated comments here. And I really was unimpressed with the 3 initial photos they showed (and as of this writing, it's still ALL they are showing). So, after hunting around, I found all the raw images online. The first 6 or 7 pages didn't do much for me, but around page 22, I started to see the landmass (the 2 rightmost images). And around page 27 (again, the rightmost photos) I start to see the horizon shots, with the curve of the moon visible (or possibly it's just the camera lens causing the effect I see), and the landmass stretched out in front of me.
Finally. Some real photos, with land that I can decipher. Cool!
And, uh, too bad there were no critters running around.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
This picture is prety strange, it doesen't fit to the other ones at all. I wonder what it is...p g
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/contrast/triplet.202.j
Here's what they have at the ESA:
$ ls |wc
302 302 7628
Plus a couple thumbnails, because you wanted to see them *right away*.
This is the way it works: Data transmitted over a radio signal must be transmitted slower the farther away you are in order to be intelligible. As distance increases, so does interference, thus you need to place your blips farther apart and with greater amplitude or your bits will be lost in the static.
So the lander transmits all its data back to the orbiter at high speed, then the orbiter stores it for as long as it needs to before it transmits it all back to earth. At about 128 bps, if you're lucky.
So kindly be patient and STFU. It takes a while to download the pictures proper.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
The sounds of Titan are now online at The Planetary Society site.
That rather depends on what you think should have happened. Since there seem to be few people who want to actually go anywhere enough to pay the cost to do so, what progress would you expect? Transport systems should follow demand. If, in the 70s, a million people had thrown $10,000 each into a pot to buy a suborbital flight, someone would probably have had a go at providing it.
If you want to compare it to European colonialism, remember that many of the the people involved threw everything they owned, incluing their lives and those of theor families into the project of their choice. States threw in resources at a level which endangered their stability and/or existance. How much have you thrown into the pot compared to your net worth? How many of your neighbours would vote to have the US governemnt spend at a level which had a noticable chance of crashing the entire economy? (well, OK, they have done when they put Bush back in, but not for anything as interesting as space travel).
Space exploration, on the other hand, has gone on quite well, mostly limited by the US government's obsession with the space scuttle, which sucked up a great deal of money which might otherwise have gone to something interesting, and Europe's lack of interest. Still, we know a hell of a lot more about the solar system than we did in the 60s, and I think we've been learning it at a higher rate than we did in the 60s.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Why haven't they got images with better resolution ? Maybe they'll post them later ? I cant imagine you spend millions of euros on a probe and put on board a camera bearly enough to equal the picture quality you have on a cheap mobile phone today.
I'm puzzled.
Read my reply about that a few posts up:
0 56 &cid=11368783
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136
Basically, the pictures were already in, but the ESA wouldn't show them and they didn't want others to show them, either. NASA had some of them up on their website after only a couple of hours, but the ESA had them take the pictures down.
I could understand it if they just didn't have the data downloaded yet, or didn't have time to post them on their website- you can't blame them for that. But we can blame them for forcing others who had the pictures posted to take them down.
Those darkish rivers and that ocean may prove to be rich in hydrocarbons.
The Bush administration has issued a memo stating that a spy satellite (codename: Cassini) has revealed WMD stashed on Titan. There is also information trickling in that Titan itself may be communist. A joint NASA/Halliburton mission is planned to liberate it.
Sounds like a microphone with the gain turned up way too high. I think the reason for that is that it was tuned to listen for thunder, and they didn't hear any.
These images are much lower-resolution than the Mars images taken buy Spirit/Opportunity. What's up with that? Granted, the Cassini technology was a few years older... but it also cost four times as much money.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.