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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 !
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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.
FTA:
Several sound samples, taken at different times during the descent, are here combined together
Just guessing, but maybe those are the splice points.
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.
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
Anyone know why the volume seems to change every second on the acoustic descent pickup?
IT SEEms perfECTLY all RIGHt to ME.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
thought i was playing Super Mario World for a second when i played the radar sound.
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?
It has to do with resolution. With B&W, one pixel measures the gray-level, whereas with RGB, you need three pixels to measure each primary color. So while the images are not as 'colorful', they contain more (acurate) information. The rover missions use B&W for just this reason.
As for the cripsness of the images, I don't know. Perhaps the atmosphere has a lot of haze, or these are just preliminary low-res images. Maybe the hi-res images are coming later. Again, the Rover mission did the same thing initially.
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.
No need for a math PhD. Orbital mechanics is pretty straightforward. Sophomore-level physics for the baseline calculations. The real challenge is in getting the engineering of the spacecraft to be so robust, and to account for more subtle effects (e.g. small changes to trajectory and spin rate due to outgassing and radiation pressure).
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.
Its because the normal way of taking colour pictures (Si photocells with wideband colourfilters) is only good at taking pictures for human eyes, not for any kind of spectral analysis.
Plus in this case, there were 3 reasons:
a) There wasnt enough space for multiple cameras/spectrometer
b) Most of the pictures were planned to be taken in rapid descent/being shaken around (they hoped it would land, but werent sure), so filter changing wouldnt be so good (plus too time consuming, they only had so little)
c) There isnt much light there, so narrowband spectral filters would have made the exposure matter even worse(by factor of 50 or so, and even wideband filters would block 2/3s of the light) (especially combined with the moving viewpoint)
At least they had very cool ccds (little noise), so they could take such bright pictures in that short time.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Wait.. its full of stars.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Interestingly, the probe passed close to the Sun and twice close to Venus to use their gravity for acceleration. The kind of precision they use for these calculations is truly fascinating - I mean you have to know the gravity and "course" of Venus pretty exactly to send a probe around Venus for acceleration!
Sebastian
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
Google is your friend. For example, look here.
This is all Newtonian physics. It's not like they're just flinging the spacecraft out there and hoping that it hits the right spot. Knowing Cassini's current position and velocity, they can calculate to very high precision where it will be six months from now. It's still an amazing technological achievement, though, to be able to guide the spacecraft through seven years' worth of maneuvers to get to this point!
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
"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
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!
Holy crap! The Radar echos from Titan's surface sounds like an outtake from Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album.
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.
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.
**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.
So, why do we keep sending only B&W cameras on these things?
Because that's just how cameras (even film) work. Your $100 webcam only senses brightness, not color, just like the cameras on Huygens and the Mars rovers. With the rovers, they have filters which only allow certain frequencies (colors) to hit the sensor, just like your digicam/webcam/film camera. The difference is the filters on the consumer camera are fixed on the CCD (or film), while NASA's are in front of the lens, so you can mix and match.
If your goal is *only* to make pretty pictures, sure, send up a digicam. If your goal is science, you use interchangeable filters, or just a single, fixed filter across all pixels.
This is not only better science, but also higher resolution. Your digicam (say, 4MP), has 2million green pixels, 1 million red, and 1 million blue (in one common configuration, there are other mixes and colors), and the raw image is processed to simulate 4 million RGB pixels. But using a 4MP sensor with filters over the lens, you get all 4 million pixels at the selected wavelength. This provides more information, and science is all about information.
They explained in the press conference.
They didn't have the bandwith to send back complete sound, so they've averaged the amplitude and frequency of the sound. I assume that they've then used this to modulate some white noise to produce the sound that they've posted.
Batteries add mass, and mass adds cost. Even if you shut down the lander until Cassini is back in range, you have to warm it up (from about 70K). Since it's not mobile, there isn't a lot you can do over time with a payload of its size. You'd just end up taking the same readings over and over. It might be nice to have data on the landing site over time, but you're not going to be able to power the lander for such a period. I don't think even an RTG would be of much use.
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.
The landing was basically a bonus - it was designed as an atmospheric probe, and used a heatshield to decelerate to subsonic velocity, then a series of parachutes to float down relatively slowly over the course of two hours. It was calculated to impact the surface at 10m/s or so, around 20mph, so they designed the instruments to survive that sort of shock so that some data could be returned if a landing was successfully made.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
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.
"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?
If you're spending that amount to get a result, you want all the data.