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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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Until I see a monolith!
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
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.
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.
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
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
If you look at the caption for the photograph on that page, you'll see: "I have bumpmapped the image for clearer details: (the "craters" you might see are photographing artefacts that only seem to be craters)" Still it was a very good observation to notice those... and maybe there's something to it?
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.
Keep the lighting conditions in mind: the Sun is MUCH dimmer out there, even without such a thick, cloudy atmosphere to dim it further. And no, maybe they didn't have a much better camera: there might be severe bandwidth and weight limitations involved.
I think the whole titan mission is fascinating, but they really need to release some higher quality pictures.
Have some patience people. We are mostly seeing raw dumps with quicky contrast enhancement. It will take a while before it is put together and cleaned up.
I would note that Huygens was not designed to be a high-resolution photographic mission. Many were not even sure if the surface would be visable when launched. Plus, such an atmospheric desent probe cannot have directional antennas (other than maybe "not down"), reducing the bandwidth. For example, the mars rovers only send high-res images when they are sitting still and focusing their narrow-angle directional antennas at specific locations in the sky for the receivers to pick up (either at earth dishes or in Mars orbit).
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
I was a little saddened after seeing the pictures and getting all stoked for ultra-high-res pictures like what Spirit and Opportunity are sending back, but I don't think it's in the cards.
The uplink from Huygens to Cassini was only 8kb (don't remember if it was bit or bytes, in any case, not a wide channel) and there was only about a 2 hour window to transfer to data before the batteries on Huygens went dead. I consider 2 hours pretty remarkable given the extreme conditions is going in to and the fact that the batteries have been waiting for seven years. The technology also dates to at least 1997, probably earlier (to provide time to check for reliability against radiation fun from space).
Supposedly there are some 350 or so pictures, so at 32Kb a piece (at least what the ESA is putting up), I don't think we're going to see anything much higher.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
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.
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).
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?
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
How can the guys from ESA and NASA extract much information from blurred images?
You obviously don't watch CSI.
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.
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.
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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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.