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Titan Photos and Sounds
ahsile writes "NASA and the ESA have released the first images
from Titan. The ESA also has available sounds from the surface." Reader ZZip writes: "Apparently a bunch of enthusiasts has compiled the first mosaics from the raw data delivered by the Huygens probe. Meanwhile space.com has more coverage and pictures from NASA/ESA." Say a silent thank-you to the persistent troubleshooters of the world, without whom none of this would be possible.
this must be the best SID tune I have ever heard !
Even better than Pole Position II !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
(frts psot) I can hear windows error tones....
Anyone know why the volume seems to change every second on the acoustic descent pickup?
+++ATH0
The quality of your post guarantees American companies will hire "Americuns"
Learn your language you lazy pricks. Your whole country is filled with welfare recipients.
I could have sworn on the descent I heard "I for one welcome our new Huygens overlords" in the static
Are those lumps of ice as one suggested or are they rocks? They look more like rocks.
Does Huygens have a bore? Imagine what would happen if they found silver, uranium, plutonium, platinium, etc. on Titan! The biggest "gold" rush ever!
Cool!
Billy
The captions on one of the sites talk about that, and this certainly looks like it, but am I the only one who sees what looks like small craters in in the "water"? Kind of hard to describe their locations, but there's one near the top-right corner of the image I linked to. Even so, it definitely looks like liquid, especially with the rivers.
Until I see a monolith!
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
Where is the sound of it hitting the ground. I just heard air/methane rushing by. Seems there should been a crunch, bang, squish or something when it hit the surface.
Do not listen to this noise unless you want to feel like your head is about to explode!
We want to find out about Titan mainly because it's like we think Earth was. We understand more about how Titan is now, we understand more about how Earth was eons ago, we understand more about Earth now. Also, it's a good spot for colonising the outer solar system. Yes, we don't plan to do that any time soon, but eventually we will, and the information will be very useful then.
Funny, that's what most people thought about Columbus and his wild ideas about a passage to Asia...
prepare americas,
compare this huygens to Fernao de Magalhaes, Vasco da Gama and Cristovão Colombo trips, theres a new india out there to colonize
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/pia06561.html
That's no moon...
I never really thought of it that way! Cool, that helps out a bit.
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
The radar sounds sounded like the 8-bit sound effects from Yars' Revenge on Atari.
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
Now on with the slide show!
Go for the mosaics link, they have the best shots. It looks to me like what you'd expect if you dropped a probe onto earth - rivers, seas, clouds, craft landing on a hard rock strewn surface.
If you care so little, why did you expend the effort to post this response? How will that benefit you in the near future?
The short answer is thus: not everything that is worth doing has benefits, and not everything that will benefit you in the future is evident in the present.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I think the whole titan mission is fascinating, but they really need to release some higher quality pictures. The ones they've released are about as crappy (quality wise) as your average cell phone camera picture. We're getting like 320x240 pics with extreme JPEG compression artifacts. They had to have loaded something better than that on Huygens right? :)
:)
Unfortunately the sounds are really boring to the untrained ear. One is just hissing that constantly changes volume between loud and quiet, the other sounds like an old atari game.
Well, here's hoping to the future. Please don't take this message as a troll, as this was a very successful mission and an engineering feat. I just want to see better results already
Joseph?
Not worth the money spent, the funds could have been better used to bomb the shit of some poor defenseless Iraqi children.
I'd love to see NASA spend some of its new $billions running a planetary probe on the Earth, exactly like those to our neighbors, including the launch of a probe from Mars, or at least the Moon. The project would target the Earth from the same point of (simulated) ignorance with which we target pioneering probes to other planets, using the same decisionmaking systems to pick the trajectories and sites for exploration.
We'd get a lot of interesting data about the Earth, a great product of our investments in space exploration. But we'd also get a way to interpret the results of those other missions, by comparing the "probe" picture of the Earth with our other pictures of the Earth, including firsthand experiences here at home. We'd get some insights into how the "outsider" biases of these probes differ from the "if I were there" experience we're all seeking, vicariously exploring these remote places through probes and networks. What would a hydrocarbons analysis tell us about Iraq, West Virginia, or Calcutta? Let's get some contextual reference. Such an investment could make our own experience at home into the key to reading all the explorations of the rest of our system.
--
make install -not war
Unless I'm mistaken and Slashdot is really reaching out to that 12-year demographic.
Cool!
AC
At the beginning, I thought it was an alien bleepbleeping! Then silence came and calm took over.
Anyone think of Enduro when listening to that radar?
"XaviorPenguin", is that a reference to a Linux hobby or even job?
Why should Linus have bothered to start a new OS, why do people bother to invest lots of time in this OS when there are alternatives?
Is'n curiosity what drives science and the advancement of humanity?
And isn't space technology one of the pinacles of science and human endeavour?
If I've ever seen a dumb remark on /. then this is probably one of the dumbest.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Perhaps it is a stupid question, by why do the pictures look so light? What I mean is, from that distance, I didn't think the Sun was very bright. Is the light in the photographs natural, or is it enhanced? Or, am I being influenced by sci-fi movies that portray the Sun as being so small way out there?
Proverbs 21:19
You mean guantanamo V2.0?
It sounds like a billion crickets chirping at once!! A function of the density, pressure, temperature. Truly exotic. Sounds of Titan
While reading various coverage of the Huygens descent to Titan, they were talking about one of the two channels not working correctly (Jan 14, 08:57PST).
Is this because they applied the fix discussed in the "persistent troubleshooter" link to only one of the two channels? Leaving the other channel as it was originally (that is, broken?)
Can't help but wonder.
The parent post is a theory, not a fact.
I am encouraging open thinking. For example: Earth was created by space squirrels trying to hide their space acorns.
Could someone explain why they have to colorize the black and white photos with reflection spectra data? We now have color webcams for under a $100; it is reasonable to assume, then, that a gov't agency like NASA had access to such (or better) technology for reasonable prices at the time of Cassini's being built.
So, why do we keep sending only B&W cameras on these things? We certainly had the room. We had the money (or at least the delta b/w b&w and color). The weight and power consumption should be similar. So why? And why is the resolution on the surface photo only marginally crisper than those from the Venera lander forty years ago?
Wouldn't it be even smarter to send one with a variable lensing system whose images could be recombined into a large variety of regions of the EM spectrum?
Huh .. another rejected story ends up here !!
The vast majority of the universe and all the things in it won't benefit you in the near future. Likewise the objects, people languages, animals and plants on earth, likewise (I suspect) most of the books ever written.
Luckily for us, you are deeply insignificant.
it's a space station!
d ia/pia06561.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multime
thought i was playing Super Mario World for a second when i played the radar sound.
Maybe the probe is going through thick clouds and the friction on the hull increases while inside.
It is amazing that the whole multi-stage - three parachutes amongst other - landing was a success and the images are very interesting, but why the images seem to be ever more blurry than these of the Venera 14 from 1982?
They're not thinking of colonizing asteroids either, much less comets. What they are thinking of seriously is harnessing them as resources. Just like asteroids can serve as a cheap source of metals for off-world development, Titan can serve as a cheap source of fuel. It may not be the best fuel, but it is better than burning even more fuel to ship fuel out from Earth.
than Titan where we haven't gone and Io comes to mind. I have been truly pleased by the tantalizing pictures that have come from the Huygens probe. What a fascinating place Titan is. Landing near a volcano on Io would be the only mission that could surpass this one! *hint hint*
Just out of curiousity, what sort of algorithms and formulas did they have to use to calculate the trajectory to make it out to Titan?
If anyone who has a math PhD, could you elaborate how they managed to even get there?
Live forever, or die trying.
The real issue here is: Do we really need to spend time taking close up pictures of planetary bodies that we know once contained liquid oceans of some type?
They don't answer the question "Does or did life exist there?" In the Mars probes example: why did we bother sending a probe to determine that there was liquid on Mars by taking pictures? Anyone who was reasonable knew that from space and ground based observations of Mars. Even now that we "know" that Mars contained water (in Mars' case), the question is "So what?" It doesn't mean there was every any life there, and that is the end goal.
Sending a probe to a planet without giving it the ability to detect whether life existed or not is a waste of time. That is a truly hard problem to solve I know, but that should be the ultimate mission of the probe teams at ESA/NASA. Is/Was there life on Mars or Titan? We still have no clue, and are not any closer to finding out. Sending back pictures of yet another apparently dead planet with rocks doesn't interest anyone anymore. We need real answers.
I know, I know - you think its "flamebait" because you don't agree with me. You are wrong. It is not flamebait, just an alternate viewpoint.
I am kinda disappointed. If they HAVE to fake these pictures they could at least use a different photostudio. This looks exactly the same as the ones from their Mars shooting ;-)
Ah, it might be that there was very dark - it is about one light out long to Sun and there is a thick haze. I forgot about that.
Does anyone know if there are any plans out there to go to Europa? Some kind of flying ice corer or something... Now that we're properly targeting interesting moons, what could be more interesting (in this context and many others) than probing the seas of Europa?
I've got some mirrors of raw images.
How To Get Humans To Mars
from 1997...the probe was probably playing Excite Bike or Spy Hunter: what else would a probe do on a 7 year journey from '97? Listen to the Spice Girls? Ha!
(the vehicle sound effects of Excite Bike or Spy Hunter is what came to mind when I heard the clip...)
"What a specious argument. Why would we think that a MOON that revolves around a planet is anything like what Earth ever was like."
Because the atmosphere appears to be very similar, that's why... what does where it is have to do with it? We're not studying it's orbit... we can do that from here.
Why can't we study the Earth and Titan? People are drilling ice cores and things all the time to find out more about Earth's past from Earth - why not help them out with information from somewhere else?
You want to find out more about how some fossilised person lived you don't just study them - you study living people too. This is no different - you get all the information you can from whereever you can get it.
It's the best place in the outer solar system to colonise - the atmosphere protects it from any radiation, it has pressure which makes building a colony easier - we just have to worry about the temperature, not the pressure... etc.
How will we know unless we look?
You want to study the Earth; fine, study it. Lots of people are. But it's hard to understand anything if you've only got a single example. Looking at Titan, and indeed, Mars, Venus, or anywhere else, gives us more information about Earth. If we see similarities, we can ask ourselves why there are similarities given the different environments; if there are differences, we study them learn exactly what is different, and why. Either way, our total understanding of the universe goes up.
No one is seriously thinking of colonising Titan, ever. It is -200 degrees below zero on the surface. It offers no benefits over other planetary bodies.
Actually, that's completely wrong. Titan is ideal real estate for an off-world colony. It's perfectly located for easy access to orbiting resources; Saturn and its rings. It has enough gravity to be comfortable. It has huge amounts of water ice, from which oxygen can be easily generated. The atmosphere is a nitrogen-methane mix, which turns out to be almost perfect as propellent for nuclear rockets (when they get off the ground). The atmosphere will also protect the surface from Saturn's lethal radiation.
Maybe when we have to tech to actually consider colonising planets, we can send probes out then for that purpose. Right now, it is a waste of money.
We have the tech. We could set up a base right now, if we could get there. (Development of a decent propulsion system is ongoing, nuclear rockets should be along soon.) As for being a waste of money... the entire Cassini mission cost 3.3 billion dollars. The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap.
Remember that Huygens was to sink beneath the waves rapidly, but as it sank, it would take pictures of the ocean? So much for the wisdom of the scientists!
They never said that. In fact, they designed the probe to float in case it did land in liquid. How would it send data back if it's sunken beneath the waves?
If it is a clear liquid like water or liquid nitrogen then I wouldn't be suprised to see several feet down through the it. Just like aerial pictures of the Bahamas or some tropical island, you can still see the corral below the water's surface. I couldn't see it, but was this crater close to the coast and in a possibly shallow region?
They only had a data rate of 8Kb/sec to work with, and the probe wasn't going to be able to broadcast for long. So the pictures had to be very low res.
They could have easily taken better pictures, but the data wouldn't have been able to make it back to Cassini with the throughput and amount of time they had.
I don't know why I bother to respond, as everything is just marked as "Flamebait" because the mods don't agree with my viewpoint.
My point is that it is illogical to say you need to study Titan because it may have been like the Earth at one point. Its like saying to learn more about a racecar we need to not study racecars, but horses instead. If you want to learn about Earth, you need to study the Earth. This is logical. What will this mission tell us about Earth? Exactly nothing, although it will produce a bunch papers that will contain pure speculation based on the shaky premise that Titan is somehow like Earth in the past.
Also, we are nowhere near having the ability to setup a base on Titan, and there is no point now to do so. The probe needs to be sent out at that point in order for it to be useful for scouting for potential sites for a base. It is a waste of money, that money could have been spent on further studying of the Earth, if that was the real purpose of the probe.
Why did design a 7 year mission just to transmit 2 hours worth of data? Couldn't the ESA have sprung for a few extra Energizer AAA's?
Wait.. its full of stars.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Any amateur photographer can confirm that for making color picture in the visible spectrum you need plenty of light, otherwise you'd get poor quality pictures. On Titan there was not much light and that's why they had to use infrared cameras.
Please note that Saturn is 9.5 times farther than the Sun than Earth, so it gets 91 times less light from the Sun than Earth. Also, the atmosphere of Titan is very dense, even more dense than the one of Earth, so, this also diminuates the light available.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
What Earth was like? Yeah right, the Earth was really fucking cold and bathed in radiation from a nearby gas giant?
Thanks to all slashdotters to help test whether our box is capable of coping with the /. effect.
I hope you all like the pictures we created and published before ESA came out with theirs.
Much kudos to ESA, NASA and uni of Arizona for having those pictures out for the world to enjoy
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Thanks. I also have just found a great page about the probe instrument: DISR.
Titan photos that show lifeforms are here!
It was rotating as it went down, I think 5 rpm or so, and if the microphone was on one side, maybe the volume peaks at certain angles.
Infuriate left and right
"Does this space probe make me look fat?"
"Funny, that's what most people thought about Columbus and his wild ideas about a passage to Asia"
Of course Columbus was wrong (at least in where he thought India was), and if he hadn't been lucky enough to run into America on the way to India he'd have died. In an alternate world where America didn't exist, people are right now wondering what happened to that Columbus dude who went off on that wacky voyage trying to reach India the long way around.
Events as astounding as these deserve more than simple "Thanks." These teams of people, overcoming bureaucratic and technological challenges - have managed to achieve something incredible. It gives me great hope.
Those of you in the systems administration field at American corporations know something of how amazing it is.
- Bill
is somewhat appropriate.
Not quite singing praise on Titan but it's what came to mind when I saw the article. :)
His name is Robert Paulsen...
I'd just like to say that I haven't notice any europe vs usa arguments. Not only on slashdot, but also in other media.
:/
Any such discussion would have been stupid anyway, because this succes is one of collaboration. Big up for the scientists who did this and let us hope the chinese and indians join us in our next efforts.
I just hope I won't start a flamethread now
I watched conference at 2am pacific time. I believe they mentioned that 350 pictures were lost because software did not have a command to receive from a channel B. Someone forgot to implement command to start receiving data. Investigation in progress. So we got 1/2 of the pictures were were supposed to get. Because of that we lost lots of panoramic pictures which are now missing lots of pieces. NASA channel coverage was a pure shame. They stop transmitting conference after 1 hour. Cameras instead of showing data graph were showing wide angle with scientist pointing to the graph and a graph 20 meters away. So you could not make out what parts of the graph he was talking about!
I still don't understand - did Huygens actually land on Titan, not crash into it? How and why?
As far as I understand, you'd need a lot of fuel (more than on the Mars rover - Huydens was not surrounded with a bouncy ball, and Titan is bigger than Mars, I think) and a ton of luck for a soft touchdown, and nobody even knew if the probe would land in a sea. Then, it seems that the probe did not do much sitting on the surface. Why not just go down the atmosphere transmitting data, then crash and be done with it? That would be cheaper, or we could replace the weight with something more useful than fuel.
Then, if we did count on it landing safely, why not put all the stuff they had on Beagle on it? It could have a drill, a microscope, etc.
Holy crap! The Radar echos from Titan's surface sounds like an outtake from Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album.
Europa.
God knows whats under all that ice.
With pictures of this quality, how long will it take before somebody builds a file proving that no probe ever landed on Titan?...
I most like the "Animation of images of the surface"; it looks like it is raining. Video rain on a very low res camera and it looks just the same. COULD it be rain?
Your racecar analogy is not good. More like, to study human behavior, we put rats through mazes. What does this tell us about human behavior? Exactly nothing, except pure speculation that rats and humans have some behavioral similarity.
It's not so much that the mods don't agree with your viewpoint, as that your arguments are weak and your tone is strident.
And all some people can do is bitch about the resolution of the photographs. That's the trouble with science and engineering nowadays: people do utterly amazing stuff and the general public doesn't know it's amazing any more.
Well, I'm going to admit it: when this 54 year old scientist turned systems implementer first read that Huyghens/Cassini had fulfilled its mission, there were tears in my eyes. This is a great human achievement. Don't let the ignorant knock it.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"Its like saying to learn more about a racecar we need to not study racecars, but horses instead."
What makes you think people don't study horses when designing racecars? It's quite common to look at biology when trying to come up with inovative technology - you often can't beat nature's solution to a problem when you have the same problem. Hence people using natural fibres for clothes - in a lot of cases they work better than anything we can make.
"Also, we are nowhere near having the ability to setup a base on Titan, and there is no point now to do so."
How hard do you think it is? Given enough funding we could have a base on Titan in less than 10 years, easily...
"It is a waste of money, that money could have been spent on further studying of the Earth, if that was the real purpose of the probe."
Plenty of money is being spent on studying Earth. We learn much more spending the money on studying Titan than we ever would spending it on studying Earth.
Anyway - all this aside. What's so bad about learning for learning's sake?
No... the Earth (probably) had an atmosphere made of mainly nitrogen and some methane, and very little if any oxygen.
to see if its a bad enought place to send people like you
Parent was funny even to this conservative.
WOW! Damn, I was just wanting to know why we were doing this and not to be flamed or shit like that! Geez, you are a fucktard. I wanted to learn and instead, I get shit on for just asking some simple questions on why we and other space agencies are doing this. Sorry for actually wanting to learn.
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
Racecar designers dont study horses when designing cars because it is illogical to do so. Horses are not enough like racecards to make that study worthwhile. There is only a certain amount of money (and TIME) to spend on scientific programs every year. You cannot study everthing. This was not a good use of the time/money this year. Period.
Has anyone else noticed the amazing level of redundancy the whole system has?
_ image s_050114.html
Upon reading the article at:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens
you can see some facinating information that perhaps other projects (both space and non-space) can learn from.
For example:
-------------
Huygens was originally expected to send more than 700 pictures taken during its 2.5-hour descent to the Titan surface, but one of the two communications channels on the satellite apparently malfunctioned, cutting by about half the number of images received by NASA's orbiting Cassini satellite and relayed to mission control here.
------------
So that means they actually had redundant comms that were obviously able to operate independently. I can think of one space project that failed because of NOT having this.
------------
Huygens has also been sending limited data directly to Earth, where it has been picked up by a network of telescopes. The detailed data about what it found on its way through Titan's thick atmosphere has been sent to NASA's Cassini orbiter overhead.
-------------
So they had a backup plan, if Cassini failed to relay data back to Earth, Huygens would still be able to directly send limited data, so even in a worst case scenario where Cassini completely ignored Huygens, not all would be lost. This is great forward thinking by the designers.
I know this was not cheap to launch, and Nasa's new mantra is "cheap and often", but I can see almost everyone rather having a project take that extra bit of time and looking into the details (especially backup systems and what to do when things go wrong) rather than rushing projects out the door with no/little backup and redundancy in place.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
The Planetary Society held a Huygens art contest.
I cannot find it now, but I remember reading that they were also going to award another prize for the best match to actual images.
Assuming the select only from the existing set of prize winners (those shown on the webpage), I would pick either Steve Munsinger's work or Emile Raphael Franco's.
Steve's show the "coastlines" (assuming it is liquid, which we don't know yet). Franco's shows some of the river-like arteries we see.
I think it would be more fair to re-inspect all entrants for the match prize, though. Not just the existing winners.
Table-ized A.I.
And sending a probe a few billion miles out to get a sound sample from an icy moon DEFINATLY counts as hard techno.
I want to play Huygens Probe!
While waiting for the images to load on my dialup connection, I was quite excited to see a space labeled "01.13.05 / Expected Footprints": finally, traces of an alien arrival. The actual image turns out to be some boring graphic made before the Huygens descent -- took me a few seconds to realize "01.13.05" was a date. But Huygens did land on an alien world. So I guess for the aliens on Titan the Huygens probe would represent Physical Evidence (of an Alien Landing). See this review of the Spielberg movie (set your popup blocker to "Kill") for a list of the "varying levels of encounters with aliens."
Any idea of the composition of these clouds? Is it H2O? Is there any way for us or them to tell? The supposed low temps of the surface something like -180F? would imply that the air would be frozen, I'm not an expert, but isnt the low-mid ranges of the earths atmosphere well below 0 where we have extensive cloud systems?
(the vehicle sound effects of Excite Bike or Spy Hunter is what came to mind when I heard the clip...)
Q-bert was the first thing thought of at the blips. Midway through, I was thinking that someone was very bad at Q-bert. Thought of a motorcycle as the clip built toward the end... but couldn't dredge up Excitebike. It fits perfectly, though.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Did you hear about them calling Titan's surface "creme-brule"? I'd fly that far to eat something that big...
"We can't find a single missing data frame." - John Zarnecki Did they expect to?
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war
I watched that conference yesterday on that crappy NASA TV link. Notes.
a) ESA picked up a very bad habit of NASA of hyping their results as in "we have so much data it will take us years to analyze". Actually they have so little any semi competent grad student could have them analyzed in an hour or so. A few plots and some 600 (presumably) images of bad quality.
b) this is not to detract from their big success -- getting anything from that far and that technically difficult is a major success.
c) resolution of their images is atrocious. for example that single pic from the surface of Titan they showed so far is no better that 50 vertical lines at most. Tons of artifacts on top of it.
d) It would be nice if they could explain what the problem was 1) bad or dirty optics, 2) bandwidth limitation of communication channels, 3) limitation of their CCDs. Or what?
e) they claimed to have worked very hard all night long to prepare them for the morning conference. (that's why they were so dead tired). Nonsense. Whatever they did couldn't possibly take more have an hour. Mosaics included.
f) take a look at this one. http://otempores.freehttp.com/Picture7.png Histograms are from their highest resolution tif image. First they were too lazy to normalize contract. Some 20% is unutilized. Hopefully that's a result of some terrestrial massaging, if that came from the probe, people who designed it didn't now what they were doing.
Far more importantly there something extremely fishy about green and blue channels. ( Red appears reasonable). In no physical world histograms have so sharply defined gaps in them. Note also the bunching-up observed in the last bin before the gap. That couldn't be REAL. If they don't explain it assume the images are heavily doctored.
Despite all of the above congratulations to them for getting as much as they did.
Holy crap, that 3-d stereogram of Iapetus was awesome! Just... awesome! It's so irritating when I reach out and expect to feel something :)
:)
Now they just need to take the two channels and use vertical/horizontal polarization so you can get full color (like they do at Terminator 3D in Disneyland CA). If only monitors could change polarization 120 times a second on a whim
Couple other things too... to be honest, the descent sound sounded like white noise. The synth radar, well, was beeps returning faster and faster and louder and louder. And NASA seems to have a bias against jpeg... the hi-res pictures are available (in the case of Iapetus 3-D) as a 36K jpeg or a 618K tiff... huh?
You want to know how to make the joints of your pistons work better, why not look at the joints of a horses leg? They're doing the same job, there's not reason why they can't do it in a similar way.
You need to be more open minded about where you find your solutions... many major and useful scientific discoveries have come from things you'd think were completely unrelated...
That would perhaps mean that something warmed all that dark stuff, and then it froze in place to create flat areas. But what is with the rocks then? Perhaps it landed on one of the small white speckled "islands" by coincidence.
I was just thinking. Perhaps they are "ice rocks" like some have speculated before. When the "seas" were liquid, the ice rocks floated, just like ice-cubes in coke. But when the dark seas froze again, the ice rocks froze in place. However, they look kind of too elevated to have been floaters. Maybe wind eroded them out.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, Titan seems better for Human mission Than Mars. There is some Gaz to produce Energy, We need that here, can we organize some exportation to have low cost expeditions? Welcome to Titan
OK, the descent is great and all, but I think I speak for the people of Earth when I say, "I want to hear the big crash at the end!"
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Three months ago, for reasons too tedious and personal to recount, I was suicidally depressed. Not "thinking about how sorry everyone would feel once I'm dead" suicidal, "carrying a length of hosepipe in the boot of my car" suicidal. "once getting as far as parking somewhere obscure & sitting with the engine running & hose in place for a minute or two" suicidal. Now I know this will probably sound rather vacuous, but... one of the things that I clung to as a reason NOT to go through with it was "I want to know whether Huygens will work or not, and if it does, I want to see the pictures!"
Obviously the choked up NASA dude referred to by space.com was overcome due to the intense emotional investment he, and the rest of the team, had in the projects' success over the last five, ten, fifteen years - all coming down to a couple of hours swinging from a parachute and possibly bobbing up and down for another 30 mins. I'm choking up a bit not only because they're amazing pictures, and I've also been waiting for them since 1997, but partly because Huygens saved my life.
incidentally I'm much better now thank-you, thanks to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals and a new job.
Scientists normally don't like to speculate when examining data. But in this article at SpaceflightNow.com, Torrance Johnson, a member of the NASA Cassini imaging team, can't speculate enough abou interpreting the first picture from Titan. First we are told that "researchers expected Huygens to find a truly alien landscape under the smoggy haze. They got what they wanted." Then Johnson says,
"Surprises are always the things that get you."
Earth to Tor: There are no surprises here. We're seeing pretty much exactly what we expected to see. Apparently Johnson did a few more bong hits and then proclaimed that the first picture from the surface showed a field of ice boulders that exhibited signs of weathering and erosion. Cool.
Unfortunately, updated information indicates that the objects in that picture are only a few inches across: not much more than pebbles, really. Way to go there, Tor.
Notice that Tor Johnson (wasn't that the name of the guy in those Ed Wood movies?) works for NASA, not the ESA. This is significant only in that CBS would rather speak to an American than one of the ESA project scientists. Odds are CBS didn't even realize the Huygens probe wasn't a NASA/JPL program. I see 3 possibilities:
1. Tor Johnson was paid by CBS to speculate on the pictures and, with NASA's blessing, spewed forth with his uneducated opinion on what they showed and unremarkable insight on scientific discovery.
2. Tor Johnson is talking out his ass.
3. Tor Johnson was stoned when he made his comments.
More than one may be true. To me the only surprise is that it's so hard to identify anything at all on the ground with certainty from the mosaic taken at around 8,000 meters altitude. Are the light areas ice, clouds or fog? Are the dark areas liquid or frozen flats?
I hope there is enough data returned to answer these questions after it's been examined by scientists more informed than Torrence Johnson. Where is the panorama mosaic taken from 1,000 meters up? I've posted on this subject before. The Huygens probe was a waste IMO because it wasn't designed to return enough useful data to make a significant difference in what we already know about Titan. I hope I'm wrong, but when all is said and done I predict we won't have any really new information about Titan other than an atmospheric wind speed and temperature profile. We all want hard scientific data, true, but the public at large that pays for these things wants PICTURES, DAMMIT! And lots of them.
Score:
Cassini 24,000
Huygens 3
Tor 0
Visiting the ESA site with some of the pictures, I eagerly clicked on the HI-RES JPG link, only to get a 305x261 image that I can barely make out on my 1024x768 monitor!
I suppose that's what one should expect of a picture that's got to travel 15 million km or something, but still disappointing.
An excellent idea. Space exploration is a productive diversion from warfare, and expanding the physical frontiers of a sentient race help expand it's intellectual and spiritual boundaries--just look at the conquest of the New World (not all good, I concede.) Somebody should post an "Ask Slashdot" discussion on building a Titan base.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Yep, wonderful photos. A tribute to all of those who laboured for god knows how long to pull this off. And Titan shows itself to be as interesting as people had hoped. Obvious evidence of rivers and seas (and presumably rain etc). No evidence of the liberation of liquid (methane?) as water is from permafrost on Mars ... suggests true rain. BUT. In the composite mosaics you can sea this wonderful sea with river systems and deltas and islands ... and craters. Zoom in (yeah well image zoom in Firefox) and you sea that the sea floor is covered in 'small' craters, obviously the sea has disappeared. And yet there seems to be less evidence (from my pitiful survey) of craters in the 'land' area. Does this mean that wind erosion and rivers still run, but not enough to fill the sea ... and what happened to all the um ... liquid ?
Lots of questions. Can't wait.
Bitter and proud of it.
Anyway, answers are in the questions I posed.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I was hoping one of those sound bites would contain someone else claiming to have had sex with Michael Jackson.
Some short 75 (earth year) old alien.
What an awkward species that mix would look like.
Why should your great-great-grandparents have invested their limited time & resources to ultimately create you? Now *that's* the mystery...
ok bad D&D joke, but still they certainly dont have Dex,Str or Cha.
NASA has all the great technology and none of their pictures are in colour?! what the hell?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
That's a very optimistic way of looking at things. I totally agree - it is absolutely amazing. We've just been a bit spoiled by all the awesome pics from Mars recently. :)
I cant wait to see all of the pictures, no matter the quality. Release them already ESA!
Joseph?
Does anyone find it as depressing as I do that we'll miss SO MUCH of the amazing feats of humanity? I want to eat dinner in a five-star lounge with a Gigantic ringed planet half-risen in the eastern horizon, casting a sunset-like glow on the walls...
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
With the landing of an alien probe... carrying a few hardy viruses and fungal spores stick to it's structure.
Not that hard to imagine.
I ... repeat ... can .... you ... hear ... me ... now,... damn it!
Sigs are bad for your health.
FUCKTARD, you say! Well, now the truth is known! You're just a troll from Fuckecompany.com's message board!
Who are you? Slugs? Willow? Scudderbug? He's enough of an ass to post like this...
Perhaps the problem is that we think the dark spots are liquid. What if the lighter surface was ice floating on a liquid sea, and the dark terrain is the rock.
Just my $0.02
I'm already linked to on this page, but I've taken the liberty of cropping out and separating the individual
_ image_triplets_separated.zip (13 meg file)
camera views, which should make them more suitable for creating composites and panoramas:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/huygens/huygens
Besides panoramas and animations, it might also be interesting to try to subtract out image artifacts and dust.
I found this website that lets you fling spacecraft around -- it's an orbital mechanics simulator.
If nothing else, it's a graphic demonstration of how damn hard it is to get a spacecraft in orbit.
Just click on the illustration and drag to give your object a vector, then see what happens.
It's quite addictive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
they live quite long in this alternate world don't they?
So when are we going to send a rover to titan to capture more dirt and rock pictures?
Look ma, another rock !!!
The animated gif of the images taken from the surface over time seem to show distortions like ripples in the methane vapor off the surface or such, and I noticed also what looked like some falling debris or "snow" (not water ice, I'm sure, but...) in a few consecutive frames. Maybe it's just distortions from other causes, but it would be cool and exciting if we are seeing "snowfall" and rippling haze on Titan! :D
They had to have loaded something better than that on Huygens right? :)
Probably not: their connection speed is slower than the GPRS on your cell phone, so there is no point in putting something very high resolution on there--the data couldn't get back to us.
I suspect that the purpose of the images is to give people a general idea where it has landed, which helps with the interpretation of the other data that it collected; the real meat is in the telemetry and spectral data.
It's all in the exposure. Here are some examples from photographs on Earth taken in similar light levels. If there is no artificial light to mess things up and if the exposure settings are not deliberately set to give the impression of moonlight, moonlight photographs look close to daylight photographs.
That's another reason you are probably not going to see much that's high resolution: they probably have big pixels in the camera to get their low-light shots in a reasonable amount of time.
Huygens wasn't designed to sink, it was designed to float. And the assumption was that part of Titan was covered in liquid; they were aiming near the boundary and happen to have hit dry land.
And, yes, those are apparently lumps of ice, covered in hydrocarbons. You are unlikely to be able to get at minerals on the surface of Titan (few if any rocks exposed), and even if the whole thing were made of solid platinum, it would be far too costly to get it back to earth anywhere in the foreseeable future.
Quotting from NASA:
"Initially thought to be rocks or ice blocks, they are more pebble-sized. The two rock-like objects just below the middle of the image are about 15 centimeters (about 6 inches) (left) and 4 centimeters (about 1.5 inches) (center) across respectively, at a distance of about 85 centimeters (about 33 inches) from Huygens. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. There is also evidence of erosion at the base of these objects, indicating possible fluvial activity."
Is this an Earth in formation?!
That image may show the color you would see if you took a picture on Titan with a camera set to daylight photography, but that's not what you'd see if you were standing there. If you were standing there, your eye would compensate for the orange haze and you'd probably something fairly grayish. In fact, from the looks of it, the color cast might be similar to what you get when taking indoors photographs with incandescent light; does your living room look like an orange haze at night? (If it does, I don't want to know :-)
All the bright guys and gals of NASA
You kick ass !
Please don't be stoppin to listen to the rational people who will prove to you that you are wasting you life on a lowly govt. tech place with 45K salary--you are the the best dream we have.
Thanks a lot for keeping our dreams up. And also thanks to the Political entities who somehow are keeping this NASA thing alive !!!!
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
Something about looking at pictures taken at ground-level on other planets and planetoids is so fascinating. I guess because it is the same perspective we would have in person. Recently I was looking at the Soviet pictures from the surface of Venus and felt the same emotion - it's enough to make a person's heart skip a beat or two.
Hopefully within our lifetimes we will be able to casually pull up a website on the internet and view pictures from the surface of every solid body in our solar system. Now that would be an amazing thing.
I envision future spacecraft, similar to Cassini, that would contain dozens of micro-probes that could be used to study several moons in a single mission.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The descent sound file sounds like a pump sound effect in Quake 2. And the ground sound file sounds like when I learning to program sound on a Commodore Vic-20.
:)
I think George Lucas can do better than that!
I have read a few threads on here commenting on how no one cares anymore. Common people that is. Well, what Nasa does anymore isn't as awe inspiring since there is no competition. No cold war. No race to space. That and the steps taken into the space frontier today are less impressive. We landed a probe that sent back some really nice pictures and some audio. Over 30 years ago we landed a guy on the moon. A man was actually there walking around.
I think people are less than impressed because the achievment is less than impressive. Nothing was risked, no one put their life on the line. You get greater press coverage from something awe inspiring. While this even maybe inspiring to scientists and space dreamers, to the ordinary working man and woman, they honestly could care less. There are more important things going on in their life other than some pictures from a probe. While I found the visuals of Saturn stunning, the sounds were yawn worthy. The descent into Titan sounded like... wind. Not an alein sound to me. It just sounded like heavy wind. Wow.
I think people will be impressed when the steps we take into space actually yield something of importance. In the past years it has been varying experiments at the cost of billions that don't benefit the American people in anyway. Most americans don't like their precious tax dollars wasted on such fleeting efforts.
Perhaps if the science in space we have now was put towards something more useful. Perhaps mining operations on the moon. Something that would benefit the country as a whole.
As it stands now, in my opinion, Nasa is a waste of funds.
What I mean is, from that distance, I didn't think the Sun was very bright.
About five hours before landing, you were supposed to go outside with your digital camera with flash enabled aimed up at Titan and take a few quick pics...
What were you doing, sleeping? Sheesh. No wonder the pictures are a bit dim.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would love to hear details on how water will become scarce across the globe.
We have issues coming up, yes - but that's even more reason to get multiple planets involved in possible soltuions. Civilizations have always been better off when expanding and exploring, just usally not for the expandees - which handily do not seem to exist elsewhere in the immediate vicinity planetarily speaking.
For a very near-term example of this consider that US-EU relations are strengthend by some unmeasurable amount just because we pulled off this successful thing together, and the PR from that leaves everyone feeling pretty happy about each other. Just like at work if you help someone out they will be more inclinded to cut you some slack or help you out later, so to it is with nations when very pubic joint efforts work out fantasticalyl well.
And in the end better cooperation will lead to better solutions for the hard problems. So anything that improves collaberation among nations is worth supporting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On top of this, the final stage wouldn't need much of a heatsink.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I also am really dissatisfied with Nasa TV coverage, You think they could replay things like the press conference more often but instead they produce the most horrific childrens programming imaginible, or simply reply very old footage of the space station or soemthing else unrelated to the hot news of the day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...include not working so well at 3-4 atmospheres of nitro-methane and -200C ambient.
Also, if they had insufficient bandwidth to send sound, how are they going to cope with (say) a 4Mpx colour image?
Not to mention the fuss that arises when it turns out that somebody left the lens cap on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap." .2 Billion dollars a day, or about... $4,100,000,000 every twenty days.
Are you sure about that? The war in Iraq is and has been phenomenally expensive and wrongheaded, but I'm not sure about that figure. Quick math: According to costofwar.com, the cost is up to about 150 billion right now. It's been not quite two years since March 20, 2003, so we take 150/365 and divide that by two for the two years, and find that the war in Iraq costs a little over
Holy crap, that's about right.
If my math is screwed up anywhere, somebody correct me.
Eh?
...the GP stood on there. And excellent points by Doc, sans the invective. Is it possible to mod _some_ of a post up? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...we should put a big scope like Hubble in orbit around Saturn. That way we'd get really good close-ups of rings, planet and moons, plus a nice long baseline for the "real" astronomers.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I stayed up late (live on the dateline) just to watch the webcast coverage of the probe's descent and have pawed over the images that came back with amazement.
:-)
This is truly a fantastic achievement, something I would rate right up their with man's landing on the moon.
These are also the most astounding images I think I've ever seen from another celestial body.
Sure, the ultra-high precision pictures that astronauts took while walking on the moon were amazing (expecially for their time) and the results send back from the Mars rovers have been truly stupendous -- but to see the mountains, rivers and seas of another world is an experience that's truly hard to beat.
The most disappointing thing is that the vast majority of (non-geek) people to who I've posed the question "what do you think of the pictures from Titan" have replied with "what?"
Hell, when man first landed on the moon I remember that the world came to a complete halt -- as it almost did when the first Mars probes touched down on "the red planet".
Now we have a first glimpse at a new world with mroe earth-like features than any other -- and people just aren't even interested.
Ask these same people about "reality" TV programs like Survivor, Pop Idol or whatever and they'll get all enthusiastic and rave on for hours.
What does this say about us?
I fear we've become shallow creatures on so many levels
Don't listen to the sounds its just alien mind control.
What Earth was like? Yeah right, the Earth was really fucking cold and bathed in radiation from a nearby gas giant?
The young Earth was really cold - much colder than today, because the sun was cooler. Earth was (and continues to be) bathed in lethal radiation - it just happens to come from the Sun, not Saturn.. Not identical, but close enough to be of interest..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Yes
If you're spending that amount to get a result, you want all the data.
A 4.0 megapixel camera has (typically) 1 million "red" sensitive pixels, 1 million "blue" and 2 million "green".
RGRGRGRGRGRG
So it doesn't have 4 million independent RGB data triplets - it has 4 million RGB data triplets where the missing pair of colours at each point was generated by software interpolation from the surrounding elements.
So the raw data from an 8-bit 4 meg camera sensor occupies 4 meg rather than 4x3 meg.
where the TV programme discusses a possibility that currently the worst of global warming caused by CO2 is reduced by atmospheric pollution.
The pollution messes up monsoons, so is a bad thing it its own right, but if we remove these "dimming" effects (e.g. by stopping all US airline flights on 12th Sep 2001) then temperatures start to shoot up.
Hence a conclusion that we might be balancing on a knife-edge ...
"In an alternate world where America didn't exist"
they'd all speak German
My interest in aerospace engineering came about when I saw pictures taken from the Viking landers. It dawned on me that I was looking at another world, a world that was not Earth, a world outside of our own, a TRULY ALIEN world. The word 'alien' was the strongest component of this fascinating experience. I must say that the super low resolution of the Titan pictures has been underwhelming but it is still amazing. I hope these weren't all of the pictures.
The BBC article is a great example of scare tactics - we're running out of water!
But as they note, a lot of the problem is just inefficent use of the water we have.
Furthermore the oceans are not "too salty to use". Currently it is too expensive to distill and make use of this water on a large scale, but if undeground aquafers were really depleted you can bet some efforts would be underway.
I live in Colorado which cares about water a lot more than most US states, especially having gone through a multiple year drought. but you know what? I still see plenty of lawns and precious little Xeriscaping. I'll believe water is getting scarce when it quadruples in cost from the current absurdly low cost, and office parks start putting in xeriscapes instead of lawns.
Water is not running out, it is just shifting - and human populations will shift with it. If it really starts running out costs will rise, and then techological solutions will be applied to reduce the problem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What does Saturn radiate?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I think the saying which sums up the approach you're aiming for is "live your life so that you could safely sell the family parrot to the town gossip".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Can't see it getting past any boring committees though.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"She lives for others. You can tell which others by their 'hunted' look." (-:
I try to care for others but not be a busybody.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and threaten to get a job running the US FAA if they refuse.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We have a leading candidate for the Cassini extended mission ... aerobrake into orbit around Titan and bang away through the methane hole. From a couple of hundred kms up, Cassini's cameras/spectrometers would do an amazing job ... the narrow-angle optics doing as well as the descent panoramas but in color and w/ many more pixels. A noble end for the mission later this decade.
Saturn radiates... ...RADIATION!
----
Ok, no, actually it's heat that is radiated. Saturn radiates more heat energy than it receives form the Sun. This heat will probably not harm anyone.
But Saturn (like all other planets) also has "radiation belts", that are composed of charged particles flying around the planet. If a spaceship would fly through the Saturn's radiation belt, than it would indeed receive a lethal dose of "radiation" radiation. Though, I don't know if the radiation belt is large or powerful enough to harm anybody on Titan.
Anyway, an atmosphere will provide protection form all kinds of radiation - solar radiation, belt radiation and even evil alien mind control radiation. So don't worry =)
More seriously, could this be flowing liquid, or falling flakes?
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/huygens1.gif
Maybe my imagination wants me to see things, but it does look like pebbles lying in very shallow liquid.
Bare in mind that the pebble in the lower middle of the picture is about 4cm (1.5") and is 85cm (~3') away.
All alien planets really do look like a disused quarry.
I'm no expert in chemistry and physics of course, but my guess would be that while there may be pockets of liquid methane and what not in places, the majority of it is probably frozen, especially on the surface.
All your base are belong to Google.
I fully agree with it too, our destiny doesn't lie on this planet, we're eventually going to jump into the realm of science-fiction.
I wish we would be alive to see it, but we won't.
All your base are belong to Google.
"High Resolution" Imager (HRI) - 160x256 pixels
"Medium Resolution" Imager (MRI) - 176x256 pixels
Too bad U of R only graduates about 10 - 20 optical engineers a year (i'm one of 'em). They must've hired an intern to design that system.
pfft.
imaging was designed and processed in Tuscon, Arizona.
Hey, baby-
I got a probe for ya!
It's a huge 'un... headed for Uranus!
What I'm thinking about is weight, volume, and the ability to keep the spacecraft warm enough to operate. Cassini's RTG is about the size of a person (don't know the weight, but I have to imagine it weighs a *lot* more than a person) and provides under 900W of power. Without doing any calculation, I don't see 900W (imagine about 9 100W lightbulbs) keeping a VW-sized object warm enough to operate exposed to a 70K environment. In fact, I don't even think the RTG unit could keep its own temperature above freezing.
As far as size and weight go, if they planned on using an RTG on the probe, they would have designed the probe around it. They wouldn't have any problem designing the probe around the RTG and making it fit.
As far as heat goes, the RTG generates loads of heat along with the electricity. That's how it generates the electricity- from the heat. You don't need to use the electricity from the RTG to generate all of the probe's heat, because the RTG is more than hot enough. RTG's aren't that efficient at making electricity from heat- they only convert about 8% of the heat it generates into electricity. Therefore a 900 watt RTG makes produces about 11,000 watts of heat- RTG's have absolutely no problem keeping things hot! In fact they require radiators to keep themselves from overheating.
So temperature on the surface will not be a problem. With the probe insulated and the RTG producing the amount of heat that it does, it would still require a radiator to prevent from overheating.