New Huygens Titan descent video available

pamaru writes "Scientists from the Cassini/Huygens mission Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) team have released new Huygens video footage. "This descent animation lasting about 1 minute starts at an altitude of 300 km and moves eastward along the trajectory that the Huygens probe traveled on its journey to Titan's surface. The Cassini orbiter ISS, RADAR & VIMS images of this area are displayed in quick succession followed by DISR mosaics from increasingly lower altitudes. The surface color is approximately what a human observer riding along with the probe would see, if she or he could see the surface through Titan's atmospheric haze." This is cool stuff... grab it from the DISR homepage or from Coral Cache"

Comments

Astronomy

[Nanpa]

Nothing says science like launching lumps of metal with sensors on them through atmosphere's...

Re:Astronomy

[mcsestretch]

"Nothing says science like launching lumps of metal with sensors on them through atmosphere's..."

Nothing says "post miserably failing to sound intellectually superior" like improper use of apostrophes.

You suck at teh intarweb.

Dial-up

[Anonymous Coward]

263.8 mb * 1024 / 5 / 60 / 60 = 15 hours to download.

the surface looks creepy

[jkcity]

I watched both vids I could'nt tell wether the first one was real images or just animated though.

Information beyond just an AVI

[Ford Prefect]

There are lots of images and videos with detailed descriptions over at the ESA site - similarly there's stuff over at the JPL website.

It's all real imaging data, carefully stitched together and colorised (using real data again) - it's probably about as good results as they can possibly get. Titan's gone from being a strange, difficult-to-imagine world to being somewhere almost homely (near-Earth-like rolling hills and eroded valleys) - all thanks to this one little space probe...

Re:Information beyond just an AVI

[Cicero382]

I went and had a look at the ESA site. Then I noticed this:

"Note to editors:

The Huygens probe landing was the most distant touch-down ever made by a human-built spacecraft."

Errr... "human-built?" Do they know something we don't?

Re:Information beyond just an AVI

[aybiss]

You just got me thinking. Obviously this is a pretty cold place, but out there where things move slowly this moon must be in the shadow of its planet for very long periods, right? That would make it REALLY cold for a few years every hundred or something.

Damn I'm so lazy. I could obviously find all the facts on Google, but hey, this is slashdot, someone will get modded informative for replying to my 'factbait' and then I will know the answers without having to actually choose a URL to read myself.

Most interesting probe to date

[Kranfer]

Personally, I think this probe that landed on Titan is one of the most interesting as far as Media content goes so far. I love these animals of the Radar working as the probe lands on the surface... very, very interesting. I am just hoping that the new Pulto Probe has some awesome media content once it gets there, and even the new MRO orbiting Mars. I love space... And Nasa has surprised me time and again with what they can do, especially with the rovers that have been running for 2 years on Mars. Amazing.

The only thing I wish the Titan probe returned more of was pictures of the decent and more areas on the moon as it landed.

Re:Most interesting probe to date

[iamlucky13]

Expect the New Horizons mission to Pluto to disappoint you then. It will take pictures and spectrometry/radar readings for a few brief hours as it flies by, transmit it all to earth, then go to sleep again as it continues into the Kuiper belt to rendezvous with a couple objects out there. To be fair, they will be by far the most revealing pictures of Pluto ever and answer a ton of questions about the planet, but I don't expect them to be any more impressive to the untrained eye than the comet closeups from Deep Impact and Stardust, which are cool, but not quite as fascinating nor as dynamic as Hguyens was. The same for the Messenger mission to Mercury. It will no doubt tell us a lot about Mercury and solar system's formation, but be incredibly boring visually.

MRO will be cool. I am really hoping NASA releases all the imagery as it becomes available, so Google can add it to that fun Mars version of their maps that they recently released. It's absolutely fascinating to me to click and drag my way around a planet's surface, be it earth, the moon, or Mars. It would also be fun to be able to see landing sites (or craters as the case may be) of probes in decent detail. Currently, images from Mars Global Surveyer show a dark pixel for each of the rovers, a dark pixel for their landers, and a string of slightly hazy pixels representing their tracks. MRO should enable the rovers to actually be distinguished from the surrounding terrain and give observers the ability to discern some of the larger features they've examined.

I agree it was really cool how the Hguyens team stitched together all that data into a meaningful presentation portraying what was going on. The amount of pictures they could return though, was limited by the amount of data they could transmit to Cassini during that three hours.

Re:Most interesting probe to date

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most interesting probe to date"

I wouldn't want to date it. At the most, I'd spend maybe 20 minutes with it in the back seat of my car, but only if I was very, very drunk.

CoralCache doesn't help

[Jim Hall]

Alas, downloading the AVI from CoralCache doesn't really help you. When you grab the AVI via the cache, it sends you to the original site (one presumes they don't cache movie files):

$ wget http://www.lpl.arizona.edu.nyud.net:8090/DISR_data /Descent_On_Titan_1.avi
--07:14:35-- http://www.lpl.arizona.edu.nyud.net:8090/DISR_data /Descent_On_Titan_1.avi
=> `Descent_On_Titan_1.avi'
Resolving www.lpl.arizona.edu.nyud.net... 139.182.137.141, 169.229.50.5, 169.229.50.18
Connecting to www.lpl.arizona.edu.nyud.net|139.182.137.141|:8090 ... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302
Location: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/DISR_data/Descent_On_Ti tan_1.avi?coral-no-serve [following]
--07:14:36-- http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/DISR_data/Descent_On_Ti tan_1.avi?coral-no-serve
=> `Descent_On_Titan_1.avi?coral-no-serve'
Resolving www.lpl.arizona.edu... 150.135.110.45
Connecting to www.lpl.arizona.edu|150.135.110.45|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 276,597,248 (264M) [video/x-msvideo]

Maybe it would help if I posted the link to Google video's copy. I think it's the same.

Re:CoralCache doesn't help

[DeTHZiT]

Thanks! That's the video I beleive everyone is looking for. Mod parent up! As an aside, I was really mesmerized by the musical noted the were playing throughout. Where they used to notify us whenever a new picture was being taken?

descent video or smoke from server?

[192939495969798999]

I think I was seeing smoke from the server for trying to download a /.'ed 200+ MB video file! Good job, people, let's all download a 200+ MB file. Any chance you could reduce that to around 5 MB and just show a clip?!

Re:descent video or smoke from server?

[Sunburnt]

Yeah...to borrow a phrase from dear old granny, "They can send a probe to Titan, but they can't build a /.-proof server?"

Or something like that.

Re:descent video or smoke from server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't watch the >200MB file, but there's smaller movie available at the JPL website. I think that file was around 11MB or something. It was beautiful. There's a sort of comical sense about it--they're not kidding when they call it the movie with bells and whistles.

There's another movie with narration that I also liked, that's around 15MB. This movie is more like a narrated tour of the descent of Huygens; the other 11MB movie is more like a view of the descent with additional info about sensor status and things.

They're both definitely worth the watch, though.

It'd really kewl if this was Imax....

[allaunjsilverfox2]

Just imagine having a 100 foot screen and lots of popcorn! :-D

torrent?

[drinkypoo]

I doubt anyone viewing this story now can actually get the file in a timely fashion. Anyone have a torrent?

Someone please post a torrent

[deblau]

260 megs... come on.

Torrent?

[forkazoo]

Well, the coral cache doesn't actually seem to be helping at all. I apparently have a good twelve hours before I have the video to be able to make a torrent out of it. I just cancelled it, hoping to free up a little extra bandwidth so somebody else can finish downloading it quicker to make a torrent out of it. This seems like a very good application of the technology, after all...

Whaa--?

[Atario]

I thought this sort of thing was the whole point of the Coral Cache.

Corrupt?

[fire-eyes]

Anyone else having problems playing this? I got it on two systems using different networks and both mplayer and xine say there is no video stream....

Re:Corrupt?

[ClickOnThis]

Yup -- I get the same result. The Google video copy (mentioned in an earlier post) works fine, though.

Mirror copies

[Bamfarooni]

Here's some mirrored copies

http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Descent_On_Titan _1.avi
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Huygens_Movie.mp eg

And another version with more information
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA08117. mov

Re: Coral and very large files

[some guy I know]

Alas, downloading the AVI from CoralCache doesn't really help you. When you grab the AVI via the cache, it sends you to the original site

From their FAQ:

Because of bandwidth overuse, we temporarily capped off Coral to disallow transfers of files greater than 50 MB. [...] instead of just returned some type of error message (like 403: Forbidden), we are transparently redirecting clients back to the origin site, where they at least have a possibility of downloading the file, and the server is not in worse shape than pre-Coral.