Slashdot Mirror
Huygens Wind Experiment Salvaged
SeaDour writes "Earlier, it was reported that the data from a critical wind speed experiment onboard the Huygens probe to Titan was completely lost due to someone forgetting to turn on one of Cassini's communications channels. However, it now appears that ground-based radio telescopes from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory were able to record the transmission's many subtle doppler shifts and reconstruct that lost wind data. The winds altered the probe's horizontal rate of descent, thereby producing a change in the frequency of the signal received on Earth. Additionally, the resolution of the radio telescopes was good enough to track Huygen's position to within one kilometer, allowing for the creation of a three-dimensional model of Huygen's descent."
the resolution of the radio telescopes was good enough to track Huygen's position to within one kilometer
...the position tracking might not have been done if the world weren't so fired up about processing the data received by the radio telescopes. Sure, there might have been some grad student somewhere who would have analyzed the data sometime in the next couple of years and published the same results, but by then we would have OOH! SHINY!