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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!
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!
If you want to know how to correctly pronounce Huygens, go to this web site.
Wow, that was expensive for so little data. So now Huygens is just a very expensive popcicle?
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting. There are frequently long sections of:
* dead air;
* video with no sound, typically of big rooms with people milling about;
* sound with no picture, people talking over a picture of NASA's logo;
* video with "cocktail party" sound, where someone abandons the mike on a filing cabinet and you get to hear people walking by saying "Great weather today, Dave!"
* unscheduled time with a NASA logo and no clue when the next broadcast is.
Kind of frustrating. Of course, there's the crowd that says, "don't complain, at least we have pictures!", but I'd really like a little higher production values.
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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
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.
Your post reads like some rambling blog entry.
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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
To hold you up until the first lander pictures are in, here's every image ever taken of Titan by NASA probes.
It's better than it used to be. I remember watching live moon landing coverage when I was a kid. It was comprised largely of long stretches of fuzzy black-and-white blurs, static, radio beeps and barley decipherable garbled voices. All of that did give the coverage a cool alien feel, though.
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.
Uh oh.
"NASA and the scientific community are considering adding a Europa lander to JIMO. The high-tech lander could make on-the-spot surface observations at the Jovian satellite. Europa is thought to harbor an ocean under its icy crust."
We're practicing our labials.
Here's an interesting story about one guy who helped make it happen:
e /oct04/1004titan.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur
And about the Italian company that screwed up part of the transmission system in the first place (and who couldn't even be bothered to comment on the story because they were all off on summer vacation).
Che incompetenti!
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.
Quote from Nasa's Huygens site (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/subsystems- huygens.cfm):
Much of the battery power will be used to power the timer for the 22 days of "coasting" to Titan.
So, while I agree with you that a timer should essentially be "free", apparently there's more to it than that.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Wrong on both accounts. The russians new the temperature on Venus just as we know the temperature on Titan. We can use a plethora of scientific instruments to do chemical, compound and atmospheric analysis on the planets and get very good temperature results.
Russians used Venus landers to prove it could be done - they built in cooling units and such to last as long as possible.
The pictures, while low res are an awesome site to see for Venus, so here's hoping to some crazy pictures from titan.
And not only that - for the first time all the rocks aren't angled or jagged. They are all rounded. So that means lots of liquid erosion. Plus they are sunken into the ground - that means we landed in a really liquid rich environment.
Maybe the shoreline of some Titan lake/ocean at low tide?
It took over seven years for this ground-breaking mission to reach its destination. The probe spent over two weeks tumbling towards Titan's atmosphere. It spends two hours parachuting down to the moon's surface and another 90 mins "talking" to Cassini. Cassini then has to send back the (potentially corrupt) data and it has to get relayed to the ESA guys. Then they have to set all their data reduciton/processing routines at work, none of which will have been properly field tested due to the unpredictable nature of the telemetry.
And back on Earth sits Mr Bender, feet up on his desk, coffe in his hand, bitching because the ESA guys won't put out a pretty picture in under five minutes.
You may be a scientist on paper, but you are not a scientist at heart.
--Mr Anonymous Jackass
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.
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When the first Cassini images arrived I made a big thing about it at work, which was kinda stupid since the first raw data really did not look like anything of interest, so people did not really care about it at all after a couple of minutes. These three images on the other hand are really great, so I believe people will find them a lot more interesting.