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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.
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.
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.
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.
What surprised me was what looked like river deltas. I thought Titan was way too far out for there to be water, unless its rivers of liquid gas?
Its a shame the mission was only designed for a few hours. It would have been interesting to see more or explore, but that probably would have increased costs exponentially.
lol: You see no door there!
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?
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.
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make install -not war
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
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.
Of course that goes back to the cost of transport. The energy burned in the roud trip to collect the methane from Titan would probably be greater than the energy we'd get by using the methane once we get it back here. It could be used as a cheap "fuel stop" for activity farther out in the solar system, perhaps. It may not be as effective as other fuels, but like you said, there are litterally rivers of the stuff sloshing around, so it's almost free for the taking.
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
Holy crap! The Radar echos from Titan's surface sounds like an outtake from Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
This is off-topic mostly, but speaking of Venera and image resolution, it's amazing what this person has been able to do with image reprocessing techniques.
Basically, they took the old photos and used modern image processing techniques to enhance the resolution even more.
Truly remarkable.
Perhaps similar feats can be achieved with time for the Titan images.
What about a blimp probe? Since Titan has a substantial atmosphere, it should be possible to send a blimp with cameras and such to float around and take measurements. With Titan's 200 MPH winds, you probably wouldn't be able to steer it too well, but if you gave it long enough battery life, you'd probably get a good look at most of the surface, right? Since it would be moving unpredictably, you'd need a mothership capable of listening for some sort of constant tone, then locking onto the blimp probe and requesting a data upload, or something like that.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
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.
There are some strange things that appear at the landing site.
:)
If you take the better quality images and sticth them to gether into a animation, you'll notice that for the most part there are just some slight changes in jpeg artifacts.
But if you watch, you will see some things flit down and then back up again. They're not artifacts of compression. It almost looks like some fat snow flakes (other than they fact they go up again.
Not really going to know what they are until we get some better images.
But the one really really strange one is from the side camera at the landing site (the one with the light illuminating the ground). There are three frames where something lands on the lower left of the camera, and then takes off. Possibly one of the "fat snowflakes".
I'm not saying these things are life forms, but I would be really curious to find out what they are. Maybe methane or ethane snowflakes? Cooler, real snowflakes?
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