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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.
FTA:
Several sound samples, taken at different times during the descent, are here combined together
Just guessing, but maybe those are the splice points.
They never said Titan was a sea. They said it *might* have sea(s), and that if it did, Huygens might land in it, but it also has a solid surface, and Huygens could just as well land on that instead. Plus, some of those pictures look very much like seashores. This for example.
If Martians lobbed a probe at the Earth, they should also expect it to hit sea, considering that it covers 3/4 of the planet's surface. That doesn't stop some meteorites from landing on, er, land.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
They should have interpolated between them so that they would sound more natural, less scientific perhaps.
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?
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.
At those temperatures water is a rock.
Despite the low perceived quality of the images, I continue to be astonished by them. Titan is a place, unlike any we've seen before, waiting to be explored. How soon do we (NASA/ESA/anybody) go back?
First new world humans (or their emissaries) have landed on since 1976. That's one for the history books!
...laura
Every once in awhile, I am reminded how amazing and exciting it is to live at a time like this. Think about it, we're disappointed (and I agree, I would like to see higher res photos as well) about the quality of sounds and pictures FROM ANOTHER FREAKING PLANET! (moon, whatever).
Seriously, how cool is it we can take that for granted? These images of an alien world, with detail, not some blurry photo from space, are easily available on our computers. I mean, about a hundred years ago, people were amazed by electric lights, and powered aviation had just started. From Kitty Hawk to Titan in a hundred years (+/-)? Unfuckingbelievable. Life is good.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
"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.
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
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?
I think I recall it was moving about 6 meters per second -- you can look it up. Not terribly fast; it had a spike on the underside that penetrated about six inches that indicated a hard crust over a softer material. Someone mentioned 'creme brulee' or mud. I hope it wasn't a turtle ....
From Planetary Society's weblog; bad news was loss of one channel; good news was that all the big radio observatories on Earth went on listening to the data, and recorded it -- and so the information that did not get to Cassini for relay will be reconstructable, though it will take months to do so! 17 years ago they did not count on having Earth observatories available that would be able to do this.
Also, there was I think only 10 minutes between the time the probe reached the surface and the time that Cassini went over Titan's horizon and out of line of sight. That matched the expected 10 minutes of battery life after landing. Most of the data was taken and transmitted during the descent by design.
The 'two hours' of signal that the lander continued to send, again, seems to have been picked up by earth-based radio telescopes -- it's a huge bonus and backup for this data to have been captured, whatever it is.
There will be a lot of math to be done to take the raw data captured and figure out the _different_ doppler shift corrections to apply for signals as received on Earth, vs. the ones expected to be received on Cassini and retransmitted, to make sense of the signal.
So I understand it at the moment; I think once the Planetary Society people and Huyghens team get some sleep they'll be able to tell us more.
I think you are overlooking one key aspect of this mission, which perhaps could have been mentioned earlier on in this discussion.
This mission launched in 1997.
However, the way space missions like this work, all the technology has to be tested and certified years in advance. Check out this comment here. You will see one of the engineers interviewed stated that work on this project was started decades ago. Did you have a phone on your camera 10 years ago? Hell, ten years ago I didn't even have a frickin cell phone.
The attitude you received for your comments can be directly attributed to the lame-ass/wannabe libertarian bullshit so often spewed here about NASA being the most useless government agency (which is certainly saying something, from an insult point of view) when in reality they have done many incredible things. So your comments about pictures not being clear enough could just have easily been some other lame slashdot poster's comments about how the camera failed to work because they tried to use some modern technology that wasn't tested. It seems that many people here are always looking to bitch about whatever NASA does. Yes, the agency isn't perfect, and yes, perhaps they could have done better. But his pointing out the link to the NASA career site was simply to state that if you really think you can contribute to these sorts of projects in a meaningful way, then we would all appreciate you doing so, for the benefit of humanity. Now the way he went about making this statement wasn't the best way possible, but I think deep down that's what he meant.
I guess in the end with these sort of projects it boils down to one having to pick one's poison, but I sure would rather have some real and usable scientific data come back then have a seven year mission be ruined over the desire to have some colour high res photos that aren't that necessary for the research being done anyways.
(BTW, I am not the person you were having the previous conversation with, however you seemed like a very rational person and this seemed like as good of a time as any to interject, as I'm sure many other discussions will end in much the same manner as yours did).
I don't know where you've got that bit of info but on the ESA/NASA sites it's claimed the thing would float.
How could you transmit pics once it would be submerged?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And sending a probe a few billion miles out to get a sound sample from an icy moon DEFINATLY counts as hard techno.
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 fix in question (rearranging the Cassini-Huyens trajectory geometery at the time of descent to reduce Doppler shift) applied to both channels, since they're both attached to the one probe.
Disclaimer: I edited the IEEE Spectrum article on Smeds' discovery of the fault.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
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.
If you're spending that amount to get a result, you want all the data.
Even limited evening light on earth is probably a heck of a lot brighter than daylight on Titan - remember that Titan's atmosphere is effectively opaque at visible wavelengths, and remember that Saturn is 9 au out - if I remember my inverse square law correctly, that would make the sunlight 1/81 as effective (somebody feel free to correct me here) even at the cloud tops. And those $400 5 Mpl cameras weren't available in 1997 when Cassini was launched.