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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!
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!
all these worlds are yours, except Europa.
attempt no landings there.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
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.
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
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
Two reasons:
1.) Its antenna is only strong enough to send signals to cassini, and cassini only 'see' Huygens for so long before it sets over the Titan planet.
2.) Its battery life is very short (because they knew they'd only have such a short time to transmit the data to cassini).
The planet IS harsh (like -290F), but its built to survive it long enough to talk to Cassini until it sets.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
at least cassini turned and is transmitting.
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.
The images will be posted from the moment they are available at
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
If you want to know how to correctly pronounce Huygens, go to this web site.
From http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html/ it seems that Huygens has been transmitting it's carrier signal for over 5 hours, initially it was monitored from the US until Titan went below the horizon when an Australian telescope picked up.
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?
Wow, that was expensive for so little data. So now Huygens is just a very expensive popcicle?
Battery life. The probe, if I remember correctly, has five LiSO2 batteries that are its sole power source (along with some 1W radioactive heaters simply to maintain its temperature).
The trip to Titan took three weeks, and there was at least some electrical activity on the probe that whole time (I know it had a timer set to "wake it up" for the descent). Then the probe kicked into high gear for the descent, running all its systems off the batteries.
It was expected to go dead sooner than it did, but the lost data probably wouldn't have told us much -- after it had been sitting on the surface for a few minutes, it had probably already reported everything interesting.
The lost Huygens trasmissions:
Yep, still cold.
My batteries are getting kinda low.
Still cold. This rock is hurting my ass.
God damned this rock. It's poking right into my radiothermal heater.
Holy shit it's cold here.
Batteries about to give out. Hey, is anybody listening?
Heeeellllo, anybody there? Cassini? Can you hear me?
Great, I'm going to die with a fucking rock in my ass and nobody listening to me.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Those guys cheer and clap at everything, though. For all we know, it could be that they're really excited about lunch.
You also have to take into consideration when the Cassini was launched, October 12th, 1997, whereas the Mars rovers were launched in the summer of 2003. They put the best ideas and instruments available for the job on the probe at the time. 6 years of additional technology, and better climates on Mars, are the reason for their successes.
Another issue has to do with launch vehicles. At the time Cassini was put up, we didn't have the same delivery vehicles (aka, rockets) that we do today, and thus the overall system was constrained in weight and size to a greater extent than the Mars rovers were.
Regardless, the probe is there, and it's alive, unlike some other probes I recall (Beagle 1 and 2) attempting to fly through their intended targets, rather than land on them. I'll be interested to see what we can assertain from this little outing, and whether or not it spurs more numerous probes in the future.
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.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
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
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
Of course, there's always the old law that nature always finds a way. But there's not much nature on this planet that can tolerate those temperatures.
A really interesting philosophical question is why not seed Venus with bacteria and orgnaisms able to tolerate the heat and pressure and try to terraform it? Why not? It's not like we'd be crowding out the Venusians.
But, yeah, bring on the cool pics!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
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.
Great, I'm going to die with a fucking rock in my ass and nobody listening to me.
Jim Morrison lived on Jupiter?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Nothing works at -290F. Electronic circuits don't work when it's that cold. Batteries don't work. The thing has to rely on it's built in radioactive heaters, and it's amazing it survived as long as it did, frankly.
It's not like mars at all, which is relatively hospitable.
A "few hours of data" collected by a computerized probe is enough to keep planetary scientists busy for decades. Yes, it's worth it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!
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!!!!
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!"
...forget about getting any play from the *females* in the Huygens team.
Or from any Martians.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
"RAW" feeds are better than the circus that is CNN or MSNBC
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Here is a page with the examples of the image output.
m
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/test_images.ht
Pretty neat.
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.
In fact that's how we first knew that Huygens had descended and landed safely -- its carrier signal to Cassini was actually picked up by a radio telescope here on Earth. That carrier was received on Earth for hours after Huygens landed!
Somebody tell the natives to hide.
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
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.
Oh, cry me a river. Except they are crocodile tears for Nasa's 2005 budget has actually increased by 6% - for a total of $16.2 BILLION dollars.
I think anyone would agree that is a healthy chunk of money.
How can you say space exploration has stagnated when we are about to try and go to Mars, we just launched a comet impacting satellite yesterday, and we have two frisky rovers rambling about on mars looking at shiny metal objects? How can you say space exploration has stagnated when we have two very rich people trying to start private space programs? Long term THAT is going to bring real space exploration.
Seems to me that all things considered SPace exploration is doing pretty well, and it's just your mood that has stagnated.
Yeah it would be cool to have more money devoted to space but here's a little secret - if we were not in a war NASA would probably not get a penny more, instead some expensive construction project would be started in a powerful senitors home state.
You always have to remember when thinking about a government program that they are INDEPENDANT - shutting down any given program elsewhere is not going to automatically give more money to the program you like.
So keep crying while the rest of us excitedly follow the developments of various ongoing space missions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seeing as sending a probe to land on the distant mysterious moon of a giant planet with exotic rings ran about the same price as a day of occupying Iraq, I'd say it was definately worthwhile given the alternatives.
hey, the space race is over. youve won. now lets do some science.
See for instance http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/SPRING00/lecture6 .pdf. An RTG needs quite a bit of supporting material besides the fuel pellets, gives way more power than Huygen needs and wouldn't fit.
Enoc
In Soviet Russia, Titan lands on Huygens.
I, for one, welcome our new Titanian overlords.
Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Huygenses!
Any transmission problems are clearly Micro$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/
BULLCRAP!!! Sorry to be so vehemously blunt, but as a space scientist who works with images, I'll say that there's a large number of us who find images to be of value for more than just the "gee-whiz" factor. Images are one of the primary ways we can learn about the geology of planetary bodies. Cassini is using its images of Saturn's rings to learn about ring dynamics. Images are helping the Mars rovers to navigate around obstacles. Often times, we are limited in the data we can extract from a probe by weight and power constraints on the transmitter. So, engineers have to economize on data volume. As it is, DISR (the imager on Huygens) had to look through a pile of haze to image the surface as it dropped in. A high resolution imager would have simply returned high resolution images of fog rather than crisp images of the surface. (I'm guessing here - I haven't seen the data stream coming down.) High-resolution might be great at the surface, but Huygens was designed to be an atmospheric experiemnt and was never designed to soft land on a hard surface (although there were hopes that it might as it seems to have done). Granted, I work in the planetary geology subfield, so I am biased in favor of imaging since I like to look at rocks. Particles and fields people aren't so interested in imagers. It was true that early designs for the Voyagers did not incorporate cameras. However, it was scientists who argued for the inclusion of an imager, not politicians.
"All the worlds are your's except... wait... this isn't Europa?"
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
(I know it had a timer set to "wake it up" for the descent).
Not a problem for batteries.
Toys like BQ4852Y can live off its own on-chip battery for 10 years, wake your hardware up anytime inbetween, then provide several essential functionalities to microcontrollers (watchdog, Power On Reset), store data just like RAM except retaining it when external power is missing, and they weight a few grams. So the "main" batteries won't lose any more than their internal leakage until the system wakes up.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
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
You have a very detailed description of the spacecraft and the probe a the mission website.
1) They don't fold out. It looks like a bigger dish you sometimes see on TV vans (I would say 1 to 1.5 meters in diameter). There is a picture on the site above of Cassini with a person standing beside it so you can get a sense of the size.
2) Nuclear. You have this explained in the link above.
3) To communicate with the spacecraft NASA uses the Deep Space Network (DSN), which is basically a bunch of large radio tellescopes that are positioned around the Earth so that they cover the whole sky.
4) Don't know about this one so I won't BS.
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.
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.
The lost Huygens trasmissions:
Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
Wearly I sit here, pain and misery my only companions.
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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!
Crap, I'm an idiot and forgot the actual blog link. Here you go:
http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html
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
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!
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.?
here!
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)
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?
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?
Some images are now available here!
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting
Seriously. I mean, what happened to the proud organization that faked the moon landings?
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 #!
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