Slashdot Mirror
The Forgotten Huygens Experiment
jdray writes "An experiment onboard the Huygens probe didn't run as planned because someone forgot to turn it on. The team lead for the experiment has put eighteen years of his life into the project, just to watch it not happen after a seven year ride to its destination on Titan."
1. Doh
Doh (d)
Interj.
a) A Gen-X colloquialism conveying an overall feeling of frustration.
b) Used to express a feeling one has after realizing they have been tricked, misled, scammed, swindled, etc..
c) Used to boast or chide the victim of such tomfoolery
d) Coined by the animated sitcom character Homer Simpson in the mid to late eighties, "Doh" is similar to other one word, one syllable explicatives in that it is a quick and succinct summary of one's aggravation, but differs in that it was an accepted substitute to similarly censored words.
I forgot to turn on my cellphone this morning, and missed a call from someone dear to me. Still, reading this makes me realise that somewhere out there, someone is feeling even worse over forgetting to turn something on.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
... especially in this field of work. If you have a project this big, the chance that nothing will go wrong are simply infinitessimal. Do you remember the last time when you wrote a program of 100 lines without doing a single error?
We should really praise the gods that the rest of Huygens mission was a grand success.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
David Southwood (the ESA head of science) was the one who said so - he said "That's scientists trying to screw the system. We don't have redundant systems to get more data down, we have redundant systems for redundancy." http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg185248 33.700
i spent 23 years of my life to get a girlfriend. i deleted all my pr0n for her. now she is gone. life is truly a misery.
I never understood why the apostrophe is there. What letter has been omitted? Maybe Homer somehow believes that saying "some water" in French is swearing or something.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... a link to today's /. poll
The article isn't quite correct. A fuller description would take a while to type, so I summarise:
Two redundant radio channels were used to get data from the lander to the orbiter, which relays the data to earth. The signal for the orbiter to start listening on the high-sensitivity channel, channel A, was never given. The data was transmitted redundantly on both channels, except for images and the output of the Doppler wind speed experiment. Fortunately, all was not lost, as scientists donated radio telescope time around the earth to search directly for the A signal, despite it not being relayed via the orbiter. Thanks to this increase in sensitivity, the data acquired was good enough to fulfill all objectives of all experiments.
So everyone can relax and get one with the analysis...
Find the person who was responsible for this, send him or her up there to turn it on, and tell them not to expect any overtime for it. In fact, the costs for sending them up should be taken out of their salary.
Might sound a bit hard, but it's the only way they'll learn.
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
The first scientific assessments of Huygens' data were presented during a press conference at ESA head office in Paris on 21 January.
Results include:
off. site. backup.
women come, women go, but pr0n is forever
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Sure they have!
They just realized what was at point 2.
Signatures are for stupids.
Black and white sensors have higher resolution, just as black and white film has higher resolution. Resolution is more than the number of pixels, it's the valuable ability to resolve actual data with those photosensors.
Your little consumer digicam that did not cost a hundred thousand dollars is arranged with cheap little colored filters, cutting out over half of the photons that arrive in the camera, just so you can get the right shade of pink on your girlfriend's tummy. Scientists would rather collect all the photons they can, thanks.
Scientists do use filters now and then. Spirit and Opportunity use black and white cameras, but they can use something like NINE different filters to block out all frequencies except certain bands of interest. They don't just select Red, Green, Blue, but also various bands of near and far Infrared and Ultraviolet too. Those probes were designed later, and were going to be used on a longer mission, where power and available light energy would be greater. Huygens was built earlier, and going to a distant and dark moon where they'd be lucky if the probe lasted a couple of hours.
Is their logic still a mystery to you?
[
Edmund Blackadder: Right, let's get the book. Now; Baldrick, where's the manuscript?
Baldrick: You mean the big papery thing tied up with string?
E: Yes, Baldrick -- the manuscript belonging to Dr. Johnson.
B: You mean the baity fellow in the black coat who just left?
E: Yes, Baldrick -- Dr. Johnson.
B: So you're asking where the big papery thing tied up with string belonging
to the baity fellow in the black coat who just left is.
E: Yes, Baldrick, I am, and if you don't answer, then the booted bony thing
with five toes at the end of my leg will soon connect sharply with the
soft dangly collection of objects in your trousers. For the last time,
Baldrick: Where is Dr. Johnson's manuscript?
B: On the fire.
E: (shocked) On the *what*?
B: The hot orangy thing under the stony mantlepiece.
E: You *burned* the Dictionary?
B: Yup.
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
This is what the slashdot post says...
But I got this out of your linked article...
And I also found this article online. Here's an excerpt...The reports are confusing and I can't tell what happened. Was there a measurement device onboard the Huygens probe gathering data and transmitting it (like the Slashdot story suggests), or was the data supposed to come from the measurement of the signal from the Huygens probe in relation to the Cassini orbiter?
If it was the former, is the data not as good because the Earth radio telescopes didn't pick up the entire signal, because there was signal degradation, or because they have to piece all the data together from all the different radio telescopes? If it was the latter, is the data not as precise because of the proximity from the transmitter to the receiver?
Either way, the Slashdot post is wrong. If it was a measurement device solely on the Huygens probe, it was turned on- it was the relay onboard the Cassini orbiter that wasn't turned on. If the data was meant to be gathered from the proximity of the transmitter to the receiver, then the experiment wasn't onboard the Huygens probe but was actually meant to be a collaboration between the probe and the orbiter.
Perhaps it could be illustrated as follows:
Assume a probe has the bandwidth to send a total of 8 images on two channels, 4 on each channel, on the way down. Each image will be represented by the digits 1 through 8.
With exact redundancy:
A: 1357
B: 1357
With alternating redundancy:
A: 1357
B: 2468
With exact redundency, if you receive both channels, you only get 4 total images in the end. With alternating redundancy, if both channels work, you get up to 8 images in the end. But if one fails, you still get 4, just like under exact redundancy. Thus, it seems like the better choice because you get twice as many images if both channels happen to work, but both techniques still send only 4 images if one channel fails.
Table-ized A.I.