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Stereoscopic images of Titan's surface constructed
CozmsBrpng writes "If you can successfully view stereoscopic images then you can behold the surface of Titan in all its grainy 3D glory. And, in case you missed it, you can also listen to a human ear-friendly version of the descent radar and the winds in Titan's atmosphere courtesy of the DISR team at The University of Arizona."
Really, there wasn't enough relief in those pictures to be worth inducing several thousand splitting headaches across the globe.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Don't try to view these pictures if your refresh rate is 60Hz. My vision blurred up for about three minutes and I started freaking out.
I still say Titan is interesting, but it's not the ticket that's going to inspire the everyday person to learn more about the possibilities of Space research. I love the adventure of truly great scientific endeavors, but more people need to be inspired for NASA to get the funding it deserves IMO.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Oh yeah, look it's a sailboat.
I can't see stereoviews, I only have one eye.. you insensitive clod!
You hit upon two very salient truths about the Huygens probe. The main imaging instrument on Huygens is the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer (DISR). It contains only a single CCD. The various lens assemblies are connected to the main CCD by a series of optical fibers, each shines light on a different region of the CCD. The CCD is 512x520 pixels though about half of that is reserved as a storage section, the left over 256x520 pixel area is used for the imagers and spectrometers. The visual imagers of the DISR intrument are the High Resolution Imager (HRI), Medium Resolution Imager (MRI) and the Side Looking Imager (SLI). There's also two spectrometers, the Upward-Looking Visual Spectrometers (ULVS) and the Downward-Looking Visual Spectrometer (DLVS). Finally there's space reserves for the Solar Aureole camera which is used to measure sunlight streaming through the atmosphere to determine the size of particles within it.
The HRI is 160x254, the MRI is 176x254, and the SLI is 128x254 pixels each. Larger images have to be assembled as mosaics and even these aren't going to be large enough to compete with the megapixel images from the MERs. The Pancams and Navcams on the MERs are 1024x1024 each and have essentially a full range of motion so really nice panoramas are easy to create. The DISR is fixed on Huygen's chassis.
Bandwidth is also a tremendous issue with Huygens. The Huygens probe only hasd a 4800bps datalink to Cassini and has to transmit all of its images within two and a half hours. Even with its limited data rate Huygens was able to transmit 350 images back from Titan which is rather impressive.
So it is a combination of geometry, bandwidth, and limited technology. Also remember that despite these images being relatively stark in comparison to MER images they contain tons of very valuable information. When researches have had more time to process Huygens images they will get prettier. Until then they're going to remain relatively bland to laymans' eyes but terribly exciting to scientists.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.