Titan
The big news tonight is the Cassini probe landing on Titan. You can get up-to-date information here. Probably by the time you read this, it will already be there, and the first photos ever of Titan's surface will be available. Exciting stuff!
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» Saturn's Hexagon from Tvindy
Remember the Cassini probe to Saturn and its moon Titan? Well, it's still going strong. The above image shows a distinct hexagonal formation directly above Saturn's north pole. The shape is 15,000 miles wide (large enough to encompass nearly four [Read More]
I have been following this too, and the latest news is that the probe's carrier signal has been detected, meaning that Huygens has entered Titan's atmosphere and deployed its parachute. Its another 3 or 4 hours before mission control will know if any useful information has been obtained. Fingers crossed...I still remember the Beagle Mars "landing"...so disappointing.
Posted by: Geoff | January 14, 2005 at 06:51 AM
Update. Huygens is sending back pictures from the surface of Titan!! It looks like it has rivers to my untrained eyes.
Posted by: Geoff | January 14, 2005 at 07:05 PM
Isn't it great? It looks as though it actually has rivers and oceans and beaches (although not of water). I really hope NASA soon releases many more photos and hopefully in color.
Posted by: Tvindy | January 15, 2005 at 06:10 AM
FYI, it's not NASA's responsibility to release data and images, it's ESA's.
But the big stories tonight, outside of the new photos -- including a parnoramic -- are these (I've been watching the press conference):
Combining descent and time on the ground, Huygens transmitted data for over three hours -- one hour and ten minutes of which was on the ground, when the original projections were four four minutes lifespan on the ground.
They lost "channel A" of their data signal, which meant inability to run a Doppler experiment regarding Titan's winds. But because Huygens transmitted for so long, ground-based satellite dishes on Earth scrambled to acquire the probe's carrier signal, which will allow the team to run the Doppler experiments using that data instead. Dishes around the globe -- including in China -- scrambled to get into place, even though some of them were not scheduled to be working on this.
Of that more than three hours of data transmitted... NOT ONE SINGLE PACKET was lost. They got it all.
Plus, sounds:
http://planetary.org/sounds/huygens_sounds.html
Posted by: The One True b!X | January 15, 2005 at 06:15 AM
One True b!X, thanks for the info and correction. I'm glad to see there are others out there following the story.
Posted by: Tvindy | January 16, 2005 at 04:58 AM