Nasa TV will be starting coverage in about 3 mins - but I'm watching multiple TV channels to see if any carry coverage - and will post any news thru the day as it happens
Doug
There goes my productivity today :-)
Signal detected - it's survived entry
Doug
It's on the parachute and a signal is still being recieved
Doug
I wonder if they will still be able to pick up the signal even after Cassini has passed out of range.
According to NASA's coverage schedule, we were supposed to have commentary from JPL at 6:30 EST, but that didn't happen.
Still waiting for 7:30am EST back from ESA.
According to the latest commentary, the signal is still being received, and there is evidence that the Doppler experiment is being conducted successfully.
Next update from ESA not before 17.15 CET.
It seems Huygens landed between 13:35 and 13:36 CET. A signal is still being received, meaning it survived the landing.
It's been confirmed that Huygens has survived its landing, and is still sending a signal detectable by the Earth radiotelescopes an hour after Doppler data indicated a landing at 4:35 AM Pacific time (19:35 UTC).
Are there any mirror sites for the ESA and CICLOPS sites? I've tried those "known official sources" and haven't been able to get in. I suspect that most everyone else in the world is trying to, too...
Huygens evidently made it, now if it returned data... whew.
--Bill
As of 6:03 AM (about 90 minutes after landing), Huygens continues to transmit.
Huygens was still transmitting as its landing site dropped below Titan's horizon as seen by Cassini.
Great ! Just like the MERs, power is not a problem.
Oh those images, where are they ?
Is it still the case that the Earth-based tracking stations would be able to pinpoint Huygens location on the surface fairly accurately? Or did I hear incorrectly?
They're clapping. That's a good sign.
Seems some servers are swamped now, I hear only occasional sounds on NASA TV. But I heard a few seconds of clapping...
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2005
1619 GMT (11:19 a.m. EST)
The Huygens data is being received! Applause has erupted in the German control room after the tense and anxious wait. It will take some time to begin examining the information. The first pictures from Huygens could be released later today, if all has gone well.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/status.html
At the moment I've found this webcast to be of somewhat higher quality than the main NASA TV webcast:
http://quest.nasa.gov/ltc/ram/nasalive-v.ram
Three thumbs up...thats got to be a good sign lol
Damn, I can't see or hear anything from the news conference.
Tom
I've been watching it here: http://www.unitedspacealliance.com/live/nasatv.htm
Not great quality though
I've found a really good webcast now:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/rrg2.pl?encoder/nasatv.rm
Not a single skip the last ten minutes - though I suppose it'll start breaking up now that I've said it doesn't.
The sound on mine has gone.....whats the latest?
I heard a short burst of sound - seems all the experiments did get good science
Something occured to me...will the Huygens data remain just at ESA, or will it make its way to the NASA PDS. I hope it ends up in the PDS system, especially the DISR data....NASA is much better with access.
They believe they have got all the data from all experiments on Channel A (or B - there's some confusion?), however, the redundant Channel B (or A?) appear to be blank.
Second try with this post ... the first try seems to have vanished.
According to the current ESA news conference, we are receiving every packet of science and engineering data with no drop-outs. The first 30 minutes of the descent profile was nominal, with the main parachute deploying within 15 seconds of the predicted time. The spin rate of the probe is also nominal.
Bill
The first images could be made available in a little over 2 hours from now.
The "fog" light on Disr came on
Well, half's better than none. Shame the loss is in the images though. How many images are we talking about during the mission duration?
That's weird, I understood A and B were redundant with one of the streams transmitted with a short delay to ensure fewer dropouts.
Perhaps I'm thinking of the Galileo atmospheric probe. Still, I think speculating that half the images are lost is a bit premature at this point.
This statement doesn't sound like half the images are lost:
From http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114channela.html:
Engineers at the European Space Agency's Space Operations Center in Germany are receiving data from Huygens on chain, or channel, B but not from chain A. Both systems are identical and scientists should receive almost all of the desired data from chain B, Mitchell said.
"The way the probe system works, there are two transmitters on the probe and there are two separate receivers on the orbiter so we have two separate, distinct data links between the probe and the orbiter," he said. "These data links were deigned to be largely redundant, not 100 percent, but nearly so.
From what I've understood, the physical channels A and B (that is, the mechanisms used to create the channels) are redundant. However, the data from the instruments - which are not redundant - is interleaved between the channels in order to use this physical redundance to double the amount of data that can be transmitted during the short time available.
I could be wrong, though. But if I'm not, imagine this scenario, with a sequence of images:
ABABABAB
Now, if we're losing all A's, we'll still be able to get most of the science out of the B's, because we know where the A's where and so by looking at the B's can know what we've lost, either through interpolation or image reconstruction or reprojection or any other means of data recovery.
Ah man, wouldn't you know Sean O'Keefe would use a day like today to do some stumping for his boss and his "grand plan" for space. His speech on NASA TV, even though he touched on Huygens briefly, really rubs me the wrong way. It's like walking into someone's birthday party and announcing you're getting married.
One of the questions during the ESA press conference was something like, "what effect will the apparent loss of Channel A have on the scientific results".
The answer given was that there should be very little effect, as the two channels were almost completely redundant. The sound dropped out for me right when the possible effects on the specific experiments were being discussed, but from what I heard, most of the experiments had their data completely duplicated on each of the two channels, while (one or two experiments) split the data between the two channels. One of those 'one or two' experiments would have been the Doppler Wind Experiment, but I don't know which--if any--other experiment may have lost data.
Bill
The good news is that other than doppler wind data and half the images, everything else was in Channel B. So all data from the other instruments should be recovered.
Ugh. This sounds bad for the DISR images.
How is the data interwoven between the channels? We we lose whole shots, will there be missing patches within shots, or will the image be or lower resolution?
During the entire descent, Huygens will capture and relay to Cassini 1100 images...... so 550 is not bad, i dont know if its the first 550 or last 550 wich may have been lost???....hopefully we still get the full descent...
http://www.planetary.org/saturn/huygens_mission.html
The first pictures of Titan's surface will be released by ESA about 2:45 ET.
BTW, does anyone know the time that the Huygens signal was lost on Earth?
Does anyone know how the DISR images are to be connected...e.g, will loosing half the data mean the loss of all data in one direction consistently throughout descent, or will it be more random.
Ted
Is the A-channel totally borked - is itt just a bit screwey and thus potential for recovery
Doug
Yes, but do you mean 360 panoramas or shorter panoramas that will be assembled into mosaics?
Consider it like MER. As I see it - you'd have lost the Lion King panorama, and the Endureance Pan Point A Panorama, but the Mission Succes Panorama, the first Endurance Panorama and the Burns Cliff panorama are ok
Doug
A shoreline? River channels?
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.html
That DISR image I just saw was much sharper than I imagined it would be. The features there were described to look like drainage channels.
HOLY CRAP!!!!!
Can't wait to see more images. WOW !!
The dark, smooth part on the right looks like a lake of liquid. The squigly lines remind me of a Viking image of Mars showing dried up streams.
I want to say that that image literally brought tears to my eyes, being so beautiful and so much of what I'd hoped for. Thanks, Huygens!
I was the same. It sent shivers down my spine - it was just beyond anything i could possiblt have imagined.
Doug
other possibilities that are coming up are volcanic outflow channels and rain drainage from the last equinox rainy season
First image from surface !!!!!
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1298
First image from the surface!
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMCXM71Y3E_1.html
Looks like the bastard love child of Venus and Mars
doug
A shoreline? Out there? Okay, it's bitterly cold and not water at all ... but I love the sea and I love lakes, too. I hope *so* this turns out to be a liquid! I'm so thrilled, guys!
Not even Europa has a shoreline!
Tom
From John Zarniki (sorry about the spelling)
3 hrs 27 mins and 26 second data in all
1hr 10 minues of data from the surface of titan
Doug
Wow, look how rounded those cobbles are! Maybe the hour+ of surface images could be stacked to improve the resolution.
Yeah - a thick atmosphere might give a slight bit of motion to the image - perhaps super -res imaging on it
Doug
It sure reminds me of the Venera 9 pan. Superficial, but it looks like it. As for the channels...that depends...might this be some sort of a murky delta? That would explain the large channels breaking into a bunch of small ones. The features in the lake could be craters on the lakebed poking through the surface, or, if they are not craters, they may be islands or sand/mud bars,
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm
Cody, what did you mean with triplets ? Image mosaics ? where could it found ?
Click on the link above.
Wow, quite a hazy trip down it appears. Some of those views in the triplets could easily be delta areas on the Earth.
HOLY COW.
I'm completely speechless with the few images we have so far. We need a longer duration mission to Titan. NOW!!!
I'm guessing it will not take the scientists very long to start lobbying for one.
Anyhow, once these images are processed, and Huygens' position is determined accurately, will we be able to Have Cassini reimage the landing area in high resolution so that we can correlate ground truth with Cassini's observations? Doing so would allow better inferences about OTHER areas that Cassini observes.
wow, I just got back from looking at those
Certainly fluids had a hand in this terrain and we landed in material best described as creme broule (I know I misspelled that)
Compare these...
[The one in the centre]
Two questions....are those compressed versions of the images, and is this the complete Huygens set?
There are many more photos to come. During the ESA press conference, it was mentioned that they already had received 350 images, partway through transmission from Cassini. The ones released so far are merely the first wave of photos.
I'm just going to go "wtf" for a while
One part of this looks like a a river catchment area starting at a coastline and working inward...
And another part - just a little further down the coast ( we drifted along this costal feature - we have views from both sides of it )
We have amore classical river channel
I will keep saying WTF till we have a follow on misison
Doug
Just playing with brightness/contrast on some of the raw images:
http://img9.exs.cx/img9/4122/titancollage0lb.jpg
Eric
Go here: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/jpeg/ to see lots more triplets. Many of them seem to be duplicates, though.
Is it feasable that it landed in a small puddle?
That bottom image looks a lot like a shallow puddle - with something sort of sandy in the bottom and pebbles in it - with a torch held next to it
Doug
I find it interesting that we see plenty of smaller impact craters in these images, compared to what appears to be a lack of larger impact craters on a global scale. At the very least, this should help dating the features we see in the images.
You're right, of course. That was stupid of me. I should have noticed that.
doug - mind if I point out some of your great protopanorama work over at BABB? I promise not to slashdot the server!
Or did you lock pics for members only?
Boy - hopping between Mars and Titan and BadAstronomy and Here is hard work!
Thanks
Lyford
PS - It does remind me superficially of the Venera images as well - maybe since the field of view is so small too - for a cold shower just switch quickly between a good http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/navcam/2005-01-14/2N158953499EFFA2GPP1915L0M1.JPG and the http://mer.rlproject.com/wtf3.jpg Hope they improve that much when we send the Titan amphibious rover!
To me it looks like glacier which is crumbling. The river channels may be cracks where the ice is breaking apart. Just speculating of course.
I found this strange circular feature in the top image of triplet # 704. Any ideas on what it is?
link from wherever - no probs
just no /.ing - if i get /.'ed - the place will die.
Doug
Esa says the surface closeup shows "ice blocks", hmmm.
This raw image was returned by the ESA Huygens DISR camera after the probe descended through the atmosphere of Titan. It shows the surface of Titan with ice blocks strewn around. The size and distance of the blocks will be determined when the image is properly processed.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html
I think it will help greatly when we have radar coverage of the site. Hopefully we can use it as sort of a rosetta stone for interpreting radar data from more of Titan.
None of the links work anymore, the pics have been removed?
Luckily I managed to download all 367 images with a mass downloader before their removal.
Does anyone know how big the full size images are ? I understand these are just thumbnails.
Darn it, I got a call from the bookstore concerning my textbook order... took so long to deal with that by the time I got off the phone, the images were gone. I have heard that ESA was having fits about their release....Damn them...First Mars Express, and now this.
From CNN:
For unknown reasons, NASA, which operates Cassini, the satellite orbiting Saturn that relayed Huygens' signal, removed an image of Titan's surface from its Web site. ESA had not released that image. No official information was available about the image from Titan's surface.
ESA's aerial image, a gray low-resolution picture, was snapped 16 km above the surface of the moon. It resolves features, some as small as 40 m across, such as dark winding stream beds.
from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/14/huygens.titan/index.html
WTF?!
The crackpots are going to love this...
Well the JPL site still has it!
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/huygens-1.html
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
and it's there too on ESA's now?
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html
But the complete set is still gone.
Well - I got the lot - and there's about - ooo - 150 images from the surface - you know I'm sure you can see the lamp getting dimmer as time progresses
Anyhoo - as someone suggest - I've tried to super-res the surface image from the 150 images taken. sadly - they orig.s were hiddeously jpg'd
but
compared to
Little difference really.
Doug
In light of the disappearing images you should read this piece:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05g.html
I must say he's right about most of it. I too was screaming at the screen when they showed suits staring at the pictures instead of the pictures themselves. He could have formulated it a bit more politely though.
Was the complete set ever published at ESA or NASA? If not, I think the reason is that www.lpl.arizona.edu couldn't handle the traffic...
Does anyone know if the compression is a characteristic of the actual downlinked images or if it is just a feature of the public release data? As for the dissapearing data, if that were the case it seems a notice would have been put on the site.
Ted
...ewwwww.......i knew it had to be written by that Jeffrey F. Bell
Are the JPEG artefacts are the result of compressing the images for the web etc? rather than compression for transmission from Huygens?
Maybe this is anger talking, but I think considering we built many components of the probe got it there, relayed the data back, and recieved it on the ground, we should tell the Europeans to shove it and NASA should go ahead and release it without them. Then we should take our sweet time in delivering DSN telemetry from their missions....see how they like it.
Now where is the SOUND of Titan!?
It had a microfone right?
Hey, give 'em a break- ESA has never done anything this big before and it's no big deal if they allow themselves a day of self-congratulation. They've been working on this for 15 years and we'll get to see more science results in a day or two, once everyone has calmed down.
One should remember, too, that for ESA this is the very first event of this type with this amount of press interest, where NASA have 30 or more years of experience handling this kind of publicity.
I also think it's misleading to label this behaviour as "European", becase I - as a European - did not recognize it at all. Personally, I would have labeled it "German", but that's just me. I'm sure a German who disliked how the event was handled would have labeled it "French" or something. My point is that claiming that this is how all Europeans do thing, while all Americans do it another way, is misleading at best and dishonest at worst.
Well, except the Giotto Halley encounter. I remember reading that it was chaotically handled as well.
Well, they did say it would be a week on the DISR site before they had proper mosaics. (not to mention color). So that made me think something. When the media show images from Spirit and Opportunity, it is always those first images after landing. Despite the fact that both have returned much more interesting images. So perhaps this also effects their willingness to release raw data early on.
To sum up my position, please criticize ESA for how it has handled certian things, but use real factual arguments rather than racist ones (I'm saying this in relation to the article, not in relation to anything said on this board).
I have seen several landings in my life, and I really appreciate the NASA image release policy.
Nothing beat that feeling when MER landed and watching live at JPL - basically they had some imagers desktop on the screen- one thumbnail came down, then another, then the whole screen filled with pictures in a flood of data. The applause and screams oversaturated the mic on the cameras there... it was amazing!
I really felt the emotion of the event, as well as the technical triumph.
This is very different. I feel "naughty" for even trying to get leaked images.
here is a combo of all the sideways shots I got from slashdot - (don't worry they don't know about this board... )
http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/ramm/pano567-nodupes.jpg
I think it was a "splashdown" into a few inches of ???????
11:38:11 GMT was the Impact timeaccording to the SSP
The SSP wokred fine - all 8 instruments got data
I'm not sure what the hell was going on with the Images - but the practice of a news conference that tells you nothing and includes back slapping and metaphors is certainly not an ESA invetion
That 7th image from the end is just very very VERY like a shoreline, with waves
I thikn we're missing some images from that massive set ( which I got all of ) - as there are two sets of 3 or 4 images that show that coastal feature really well Hopefully the imaging team will focus in on that when they put stuff together for a conference tomorrow
Doug
I completely agree with you, that the way ESA handled the publicity was very bad, and the way NASA handles it is very good - at least for the MERs (I still want better Cassini quick-and-dirty raws, even though they seem to have improved recently!).
However, I think the reason for the involvement of politicians during the landing is a lot more benign than some of you seem to think. You have to remember that the Huygens mission is a truly international mission. It's not created by a single country, like the MERs, but by a large number of vastly different countries, many which fought a world war against each other only half a century ago. I don't think it's a stretch to see the involvement of politicians from different countries as part of the political process going on in Europe right now, rather than seing it as a malicious act of mismanagement.
And lets be honest - we're just impatient - we've waiting 7 years for this - another 48 hours isnt going to kill anyone
Doug
Perhaps, but I think they are completely missing it with their PR engine. The best way to bring everybody together in one cause is to release it in one go, without anyone using their priviledges deciding what and when something gets released. That way all people from all nations can feel they are part of the discovery and excitement. I grew up in Europe, I know the cultural and ideological differences all too well.
I'm looking at the penetrometer data graph -
They think it was a clay, or a wet sand or a snow - with a bit of a crust on the top (Creme Brulle)
Doug
I think the problem with Europe is that we're happy to work on something together - BUT - we want OUR credit at the end of it - congratulations not as 'europe' but for each member nation.
With MER - you can just go "well done america, now here's some pictures"
Doug
lyford -- you da man!
It's landed in a bloody STREAM
Watch this carefully
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/huygens1.gif
Doug
So is the U.S. But the difference is that the U.S. has been united much longer, politically at least.
How did you find that gif?
I wonder, if the microphone could hear bubble sounds of this flowing liquid near the probe ??
Are you sure you see a stream? All I see in that gif is that the probe is slightly 'shivering' but the white dots could be artifacts... Can you point the 'stream' out to us?
edit:
Ok, I see some white dots now in some images, but couldn't that be dustparticles blowing in the wind?
What's interesting to me in that gif file is not so much the moving artifacts, but what looks like atmospheric distortion (sort of like what you can see in a hot desert in the distance). Not sure if the effect is real or an artifact of some sort.
The word I'm getting now (although I still have to confirm it) seems to be that Jeff Bell did not intend those comments to become public -- they were in an E-mail he sent to me and Simon Mansfield blowing off steam, and Simon jumped the gun and printed it as an article.
Yes, Bell goes overboard sometimes. But -- for whatever reason (which I suspect has more to do with worshipping bureaucracy than with worshipping aristocrats), ESA's PR policies are still consistently lousy and frustrating.
By the way, does anyone have a Web link to the second post-anding science press conference -- the one at which the first images were released (albeit for just a few seconds before the cameras turned back to the Suits)? I slept through the broadcast of that one, and haven't even been able to see it yet.
Here's another mirror for the raws:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/
Looking at it, does anyone have a tool to put them all running as a movie in sequence (with the descent), *especially* the frames with downward looking camera, which later on shows the light illuminating?
most of those rocks are on the neighborhood of 10-20 cm across, not boulders.
Any ideas on what to name those tiny little rivers? I'm thinking Ellison Creek, and Blackwell Rill, and...
Well, I'm sure all the bigger ones are going to be taken by the scientists and engineers who worked on this project, but there's got to be a few hundred thousand left over.
That's OK, David. They can name all those hundreds of thousands of others after all the bureaucrats who keep taking bows during the press conferences...
By the way, a few years Michael Swanwick wrote an SF mini-story on this theme. The guy officially assigned in the late 21st century to work out of a grubby little basement office and invent official names for every single one of the photographed particles of Saturn's rings finds an ancient derelict alien spaceship in there, and -- knowing that no one will ever, ever reexamine his files of photos and accompanying names -- officially names it "Youshouldhavepaidmemore" and then files and forgets it.
Speaking of lousy press coverage, have you seen NASA TV's schedule? After exactly one more report on Huygens -- namely, coverage of a 1-hour ESA press conference tonight -- NASA TV will drop Cassini/Huygens completely and go back to full-time coverage of the [extremely bad word] Space Station instead.
Re: they can name all those hundreds of thousands of others after all the bureaucrats who keep taking bows during the press conferences...
good idea ! The Buhlmann river (or creek or arroyo...!?)
But in earnest:
The german minister for Science, Mrs. Buhlmann (yes the lady in the middle of the press conference), is a quite dangerous lady in terms of space policy. She is a severe not to say a furious opponent of manned space flight and strictly against a german participation in the Aurora (manned mars planning) program.
There was a quite sharp question in this context during the press conference without an answer from Buhlmann.
Looking at the Raw data did huygens see ground later on during the decent?
Alot of the pics was smog.
Another question why are the raw pics so small?
>>Decepticon asked: Another question why are the raw pics so small?
The CCD's are small:
HiRes = 160x256 pixels
MedRes = 176x256 pixels
Side Imager = 128 x 256 pixels
source:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31193&fbodylongid=734
It DID land in a stream! Look at the large rock on the left bottom of the animated GIF. You can CLEARLY see water lapping over the top!
Did we get a temperature reading at "sea level" yet?
I see lots of bright point sources in the "island chains" Could these be active volcanos?
What I am wondering is whether we have a true ground temperature recorded yet, or if the -180 C is from earlier modeling.
Mistyped "water" for "liquid"...Sorry!
Here is another cool resource for images:
http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens
some new DISR images / mosaics from the ESA press conference :
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMC8Q71Y3E_0.html
I think that one of more of the cameras may be in the liquid. Two obvious bubbles:
One is visible the the bottow left hand corner of the medium res frames (the middle frame). It is there for two frames:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/triplet.897.jpg
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/triplet.901.jpg
and then vanishes. Compare with this one:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/triplet.895.jpg
I also think that the high res camera is seeing an out-of focus bubble against its lens for a while. Its harder to see, as the image is overexposed by the light.
For example, at the bottom left of this image:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/triplet.951.jpg
Here is a shot of the camera lenses in relation to each other, for reference:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/probe-disr-sensor-front.jpg
Nasa didnt even wait for that Press Conf to finish. They got bored of people talking about the first ever science data from the surface of titan - and cut to some B-Roll of people installing RCC onto a Shuttle.
Nice one
Doug
There's an updated programm about Titan on BBC2 at 2.20pm
Maybe it will be archived here later:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html
From Simon Mansdfield: "Have we caused a strike or go-slow -- or is this clown a failed poet? Did you catch that there will be no release of data other than off the video feed? Maybe they'll dump something to Web -- but for now pass the bucket."
While we're on the subject of cretinism in space agencies:
(1) While the ESA scientitic press conference was very well-constructed (no bureaucrats seizing the cameras this time), NASA TV cut it off after 75 minutes -- right while Tomasko was answering a reporter's question -- to resume its Regular Schedule of video clips (specifically, yet another replay of the Deep Impact launch and a speech by Fred Gregory)! Christ. (David Southwood, by the way, actually burst into tears during his talk.)
(2) It turns out that the loss of Channel A on Huygens was not due to any malfunction -- someone at ESA failed to write the software command for Cassini to listen for that Channel! Half the planned 700 descent photos were indeed lost due to this (leading to "holes in the panoramas", according to Tomasko) -- although he says "there was a lot of overlap." (The Doppler wind data can apparently be reconstructed in full from the very good ground-station measurements.) Once again, failure of software rather than hardware is being revealed as one of the major Achilles' Heels in our technological civilization.
As for the science data: it was VERY preliminary, but the following items spring out:
(1) Other than the Channel A goof-up, everything apparently worked perfectly -- one of the 9 sensors on the Surface Science Package stopped working for 3.5 minutes after landing, but then resumed.
(2) The sound recording from the microphone, which was played back, showed virtually no noises other than the wind rushing past the probe during descent -- and the noise from the collection pump for the Aerosol Pyrolyzer switching on and off on time.
(3) Titan seems to be a moist world rather than a wet one. The penetrometer did indeed record what seems to be a thin surface crust with something underneath it the consistency of "clay or wet sand", into which the penetrometer sank 15 cm. There was no mention at all of any liquid seen on the surface -- instead, the dark stuff around those ice chunks on the surface seems to have gaps a little downstream of them. All this suggests, as Tomasko said, that we're looking at surface "soil" which has been softened by liquid trickling along and into it through those drainage channels at a slow pace. (This, in my opinion, may not be all that surprising if Titan's regolith is indeed porous, since the production rate of both liquid ethane and solid organics in the atmosphere is supposed to be very low -- those channels were probably carved over geologically long times by little trickles of liquid, which at some point then tends to soak back into the surface, maybe leaving a residue of dark solid organic stuff behind in the "lakebeds".)
(4) However, there does seem to be a fair amount of atmospheric moisture, in the form of methane/ethane aerosols. The only GCMS data released yet is methane measurements, which took a sudden uptick at about 15-20 km (at 0.5 bars pressure), suggesting a cloud layer -- and the GCMS heated inlet, after landing, also showed signs that liquid methane was being evaporated out of the soil into the instrument. And that intriguing whitish band along the "shoreline" in the sideways DISR photos of it turns out to be invisible when seen from above -- raising, to quote Tomasko, the possibility that the whitish band is actually a strip of methane or ethane ground fog along the "lakebed's" edge.
(5) The first spectrally colorized post-landing photo of the surface was released by Tomasko. Big surprise: both the ground and (to a lesser extent) the sky are orange. However, his spectra of the surface just before landing show it to be mostly water ice, with a surprisingly small amount of hydrocarbons mixed in. Once again, we seem to be looking at a moist world rather than a wet one: one featuring slow, small trickles of precipitated liquid which carve out those channels only very slowly.
I'll listen to my recording of the press conference again to see if I've overlooked something -- there were a few numbers for wind speed and surface temperature which I haven't mentioned here. Meanwhile, there may be be some kind of wrap-up broadcast on NASA TV at 9 AM Pacific time tomorrow morning after all, although I'm trying to confirm this.
Nope -- an official notice was flashed: "Coverage of the press conference is completed."
However, ESA has reprinted some of the press conference data after all -- although none of the graphs: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36369 .
iirc - Huygens couldnt be tested whilst bolted to the side of Cassini because the lack of dopler would put the two out of tune
But - they did test the Huygens Relay equipment by transmitting a simulated huygens signal which cassini sucefully recorded and relayed back.
Doug
To repeat: apparently the problem is that someone at ESA failed to include, in the set of Cassini software commands for the Titan encounter itself, the command that would actually allow Cassini to receive Channel A telemetry. (Channel A had worked perfectly on previous in-flight tests.) David Southwood stated twice that the failure was ESA's -- not NASA's -- and promised an investigation.
Thanks, Bruce. I just assumed that they would have used the same set of commands that they would have used during tests, and that if not, then this was the first time they'd used these commands because they hadn't even done tests. Thanks for setting me straight.
Sounds from the Huygens "Microphone"
http://planetary.org/sounds/huygens_sounds.html
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/multimedia/sounds/cassini-huygens/Sound_of_Titan-After_Impact.mp3
It seems that the surface of Titan is a very, very quiet place. I didn't even hear crickets chirping.
Am I correct in assuming that the jpeg artifacts are an actual characteristic of Huygens transmission? Also, after my comments about ESA yesterday, I still stand by the fact they did a terrible PR job. Just like NASA, with O'Keefe using it to plug the Shuttle/Station, and then cutting away from a press conference to show the Deep Impact launch again.
I miss probe images of heights under 1km..anyone know about this images with resolutions of about 20cm´s ? Did show it nothing, because boulders are smaller ?
or are they lost in the death channel ?
Currently Tomasko refer only to images taken in 8km and 16m, the images taken higher in the atmosphere do not show much, because of the fog layer in about 20km. This layer was mentioned in the news conference a few hours ago.
I´ve added a table of the planned image cycles which I found in a PDF document of the Descent Trajectory Working Group (DTWG). I suspect the mosaics in 13.7 and 11km heigth are lost due the channel problem, also the deeper cycles below 8km. Other explanations ?
Another theory about the drainage channels: since the heated inlet on Huygens' GCMS managed to evaporate at least traces of what seems to be liquid methane out of the local water-ice "soil" in one of dark "lakebed" drainage areas, is it possible that there are occasional methane rainstorms that reach the surface on Titan and carve those channels? In that case, the channels would be arroyos, usually but not always dry. We might be looking at an eerie analog of one of Earth's deserts. (And this may be more plausible that assuming that just the extremely slow, faint downfall of radiation-produced liquid ethane was enough to carve them -- that rain by itself would be so slow that the liquid might well just soak directly down into the regolith as soon as it struck the surface.)
From the BBC program - about 95% repeat from last nights program, 4% the images we've already seen,
The probe is resting at about 12 degrees from Horez - perhaps resting on one of the little pebbles.
Temperature profile - similar to the earth - there's a minimum temp at altitude of -200 deg c - and warm up by about 20 degrees on the ground
Sonar - evidence of echos at height - possibly clouds laden with liquid -
And that's it
Doug
I fing it funny they call the images Hi-Res images when they look like Tumbs to me.
Has anyone tried to stack the images? (Ground Images)
I have no clue how its done.
Maybe that will clean up the images.
ESA confirms it screwed up Cassini software: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_update_050115.html . Thank God they didn't screw up the instructions for BOTH channels. Still, it's no worse than Lockheed Martin designing all four of the parachute switches for Genesis upside down. Once again, it's becoming clear that nowadays design error -- including software error -- now causes more malfunctions than random manufacturing mistakes do, and it's high time that a lot of businesses besides spcecraft builders realized this.
I will try to find out just what DISR images actually were lost as a result of this screwup, but I make no promise that I can do so in the immediate future.
If Titan has other weathering processes, like wind erosion (and I'm sure it does), then I'd expect the rainstorms to be more than just occasional to produce the intricate drainage seen in the pictures. Otherwise I'd expect the erosion to have effaced the smaller channels. I am frankly quite suspicious of any explanation that does not involve the regular flow of liquids along these channels. They should probably drag in some professional hydrologists -- I don't imagine that the scientists strongly expected that that competence would be required eight hundred million miles away.
If we had a more complete map of Titan, we could tell whether we only had these small drainage basins, or if they here and there unite into larger river-systems. Also, do they flow only into the dark areas, or are there other places where we have drainage?
The SOUND of Titan!
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/huygens_alien_winds_descent.mp3
How cool is that!?
Lots of pics here.. http://danajohnson.quriophotos.com/peerServer/guest/explode.jsp?id=772
Did Huygen ride the parachute all the way to the surface or did it cut it lose and freefall the last part to keep the parachute from draging or covering it.
http://www.spacescience.ca/titan/Titan_huygens_landing_site_mosaic_big.jpg
I was hoping atmospheric distortion might create a similar effect. We are lucky the parachute didn't cover the camera's field of view!
Alright, I've heard the audio files from the ride down and the meager sounds of wind while on the surface. Where's the file we're all interested in the most - the sound of the probe hitting the surface?
Im still wondering if all the severe compression artefacts are present because theye been saved for posting online or the images were transmitted in that way? Can anyone elaborate?
Judging from the mosaic, the river systems we've seen are all on a peninsula -- which could explain why we're seeing such small drainage basins. It would be wonderful to see images of the middle of one of the "continents". Oh well -- I suppose we're going to have to make do with muddy Cassini images for another decade -- or more.
It is much better than nothing.
So the light areas are icy uplands riddled with dendritic drainage channels. What process is creating the uplands?
Other things:
Not a single impact crater.
Where are the aeolian features? It looks fluvial to me.
Once we have built up a good amount of Radar, Vims, and ISS data, I think our picture will improve. BTW, here is my attempt at a super resolution view of the surface view. It is a combination of an image I made from 131 frames and an image I generated from selecting ten good frames from throughout the surface mission.
While amazed and delighted we got there at all, I am somewhat disappointed because from the actual imaging instrument's site, I was led to expect this sort of image ( warning it 2500x2500 ) :
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/images/team_images/h3_500_big_gnom.jpg
Did something go wrong ( channel A ? ) or was this sort of resolution never really expected ? ( In which case, why the picture on the arizona site ? ).
Stonehat
Considering the confusing details, they probably need to use spacecraft attitude data to make sure they aren't lined up wrong.
The images are full size. Remember, these are framelets that are to be assembled into images. The problem is that we are missing half of them, so I hope they can put them together.
Assuming an ocean on Titan -- either now or in the past -- would it be subject to tides? What would the intervals between those tides be? Would they be larger or smaller than those on Earth?
I'm wondering whether these "shoreline" areas experience periodic inundations and desiccations, and if so, what the intervals between those inundations might be -- and whether this could be something that Cassini could detect.
The bottom camera shows an object in triplets 897 and 901 that is absent in all other surface triplets. It's in the bottom left corner. Other evidence for 'dust in the wind' or 'particles in a stream'?
Now you see it: http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/triplet.901.jpg
Now you don't: http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/triplet.903.jpg
Also, some of the bottom camera pictures show the lamp shining brighter than in others. Battery fluctuations?
As I posted on other sites since months, tides must be there with a fundamental period of the order of revolution /2 = 8 days.
The tidal amplitude in a hypothetical free global ocean would be of the order of about 15 meters !
In smaller basins it will be substantially lower, but I guess 1-3 m will be possible in basins of some 100 km diameter.
There is another very important action in smaller basins seldom mentioned: the "seiches". These are bathtub waves. On Lake Geneva, with a lenght of about 60 km, the seiches are of the order of 1m in amplitude and some hours full period. Seiches are exited not by tidal interaction, but by the wind.
On lake Constance, the mean amplitude is only about 25 cm, but in rare circumstances, there have been aperiodic seiches in the bay of Constance with an amplitude of 1,5 m and a period in the range of an hout
A strong steady wind is important. You have it on Titan - the wind speed must not be high since the surfave atmospheric density is about 10 times the earth atmosphere density so I guess some m/sex will be sufficient.
I think there are some calculations by exoerts about this matter for Titan - however I never read about in newsgroups etc.
Some people said there are no tides since Titans rotation period is equal its revolution period. Thats would be true for e=0, but there is a very substantial eccentricity of its orbit of 0.03 which will result in strong tides.(I published about it in 1982 in the german "Sterne und Weltraum")
There is a very interesting collection of images at http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens.
Images that particularly caught my attention included:
This http://anthony.liekens.net/titan/titan_panorama_polar.jpg, and this http://anthony.liekens.net/titan/titan_panorama.jpg, by Christian Waldvogel, similar to the one released by ESA, but of higher quality.
Another http://anthony.liekens.net/titan/mosaic2.jpg of the 'shoreline'. by Kevin Dawson and enhanced by Anthony Leikens.
Kevin Dawson also compiled http://anthony.liekens.net/titan/points_of_reference_to_mosaics.jpg, comparing reference points between two mosaics at different heights.
This site was brought to my attention by Neil Halelamien.
Bill
>As I posted on other sites since months, tides must be there...
And nature is full of systems that get started and develop a resonance, no, a cyclic behavior. Good discussion of the possiblity of Titanian tides.
I wonder, would it be possible to explore Titan with a series of lighter-than-air blimps? What is the pressure/density/temperature of the atmosphere below the cloud deck, say at 5-15 km?
I imagine that a SAR/SLAR radar system similar to what was used with Venus would be wonderful to do the prelim recon of Titan.
Wonderful images, data and discussion!
--Bill
Well, we already have that on Cassini. Now, if in an extended mission it can get into orbit and provide global coverage with it, we might get some great imagery!
Wouldn't it require a hell lot of braking speed=fuel for Cassini to get into Titan orbit?
Maybe an extreme aero capture combined with a big main engine burn could do it
A few years ago, I read a Cassini Mission report on several options for a Cassini Extended Mission. One of the options was in fact aerobraking into a Titan polar orbit. I don't know which, if any, option was eventually chosen. The summary of the Titan Orbit Extended Mission option was that it held the potential for greatest scientific return, but was also the riskiest to perform.
Bill
Here is a list of options for Cassini in extended mission
http://digilander.libero.it/lucktam/EXT.html
Even escape gravity of Saturn is apparently an option
So let's go for Uranus and Neptune
Hopefully it will be possible for the science teams to add some colour to the panoramic images taken during decent.... just as they have with the image taken on the surface.
No plan has yet been devised for any ultimate mission for Cassini, nor have even any plans for its first extended mission been accepted -- it all depends, after all, on what interesting things it finds at its various targets, and it's very easy to visualize the scientists wanting to take a better look than originally planned at, say, the rings or Enceladus.
However, Robert Mitchell did tell me a few years ago that, as things now stand, better surface coverage of Titan is regarded as the single most important goal in any extended mission.
Except that with Triton's thin atmosphere, the descent would last a minute or two max, followed by a high speed impact that would probably leave a crater and all traces of the Huygens. Retrorockets would be needed on Triton.
The revelation last night that the heated inlet of the GCMS after landing evaporated some liquid methane from the "soil" of Titan in the dark drainage area where it landed suggests to me that Titan's surface may be an eerie analog of Earth's deserts, with water ice serving as the sand and rock, and the drainage channels being its arroyos -- channels carved by occasional light rains of liquid methane coming down from Titan's small clumps of clouds, with the liquid then evaporating or soaking into the porous water-ice regolith (pulverized by the rain of meteor impacts over the eons) to form drying "mud".
This may actually be a lot more likely than my earlier theory that the channels might have been carved even more slowly by the geologically slow drizzle of liquid ethane from the skies. Quite apart from that liquid methane in the soil, the ethane downflux is so slow that it's hard to visualize it totally erasing even the most recent small impact craters on Titan's surface ( which are indeed totally missing in all the pictures we have); and since it's so slow, I would also tend to think that it would all soak vertically down into the soil instead of running horizontally across the surface -- although I suppose it might encounter a solid underlying stratum a short distance down across which it would then flow sideways underground, thus carving out the channels by underground sapping rather than surface flow. (That latter theory, however, could also fit the idea that the arroyos were carved by liquid methane rain.) The black goo would be the residue of solid organics very dilutely mixed with the rain and accumulated on the floors of the arroyos and drainage playas over the eons, having been washed off the higher ground.
By the way, we have here an indication that the heated GCMS outlet -- by itself -- has told us a lot more about Titan than all of Zarnecki's SSP sensors combined. Indeed, except for the acelerometers -- and maybe the thermal conductivity and speed-of-sound sensors -- I imagine all of them were utterly useless in that solid (or thick semi-solid) material; even the graph of the echo sounder's data shown last night showed a clear echo from the surface during the last 100 meters of descent, but no sign of any subsurface structure visible in each echo. (But then, I'm surprised that all the SSP sensors and the heated GCMS inlet even functioned after landing -- those two experiment packages protrude some distance below the lander's main deck, and Ralph Lorenz had predicted they'd both be wrecked if the lander came down on any significantly hard surface. Incidentally, the ESA wasn't the only group hesitant to put the SSP on Huygens -- in its 1992 instrument recommendations for the Cassini mission, COMPLEX suggested that impact accelerometers should be the only specifically surface-related sensors on it.)
I've put out an E-mail to Tomasko, Lorenz, Peter Smith and Katie Holso asking them whether Huygens did get any images between 8 km altitude and the surface, or between 16 and 8 km. No replies yet.
An examination of the description of the DISR ( http://www.rssd.esa.int/SB/HUYGENS/docs/SP1177/tomask_1.pdf ) would suggest that they could have alternated very easily between Channels A and B for the images below 8 km. After a final 36-image panorama at 5 km, Huygens was supposed to NOT completely fill its DISR buffer again before downloading its accumulated images to the probe's radio system, in order to avoid the possibility that it might crash and fail before the final images could be sent back. Insted, it was supposed to take -- and then immediately send back -- isolated image triplets between 3 km and 500 meters, and then 2 to 5 isolated individual frames from the down-looking HRI between 2 km and 500 meters -- and it could easily have alternated the transmission of these individual triplets or singles between the two channels, since by then it was taking 2 minutes or more to fall one kilometer. Whether they actually followed this seemingly common-sense course of action, or devoted all the final pre-impact images to Channel A for some reason I don't yet understand, is the question. (I do know, thanks to last night's press conference, that they duplicated all the DISR spectral measurements -- which had a smaller data volume -- on both Channels, right to the end.)
Well, Huygens touched down in one of the dark areas -- presumably one of the places onto which the channels drain (the "playas", as I'm starting to think of them). And to assume that the channels are initially supplied from an underground methane aquifer, one would, I think, have to assume that this aquifer, located on higher ground, is somehow itself at higher altitude than the drainage basins without filling them directly.
There has been some difficulty explaining the valley networks on Mars as due to underground sapping for this reason -- in that case, the assumption is that either local geothermal heat melted some underground ice in some of Mars' higher-altitude regions, or that local precipitation (maybe snow which later melted) dumped liquid water onto some areas in Mars' high-altitude terrain and some of it trickled directly down through the ground to supply a high-altitude aquifer there. But these theories can't apply on Titan -- there seem to be drainage channels leading away from virtually EVERY patch of higher ground there.
News which pleases me no end: Bashar Rizk, the head of the DISR imaging team, has just gotten back to me via E-mail with the following message:
Moomaw: "Given the loss of half the DISR images due to the foul-up with Channel A, could you tell me whether Huygens returned any images from between 8 km altitude and the surface -- and also whether it returned any from the two panoramas planned for 14 and 11 km altitude? Thanks very much for your time and trouble -- and congratulations."
Rizk: "Yes, we got some 56 images between 8 km and the surface, by our estimates, but this could be off by 5 or 10 in either direction, because our altitude scale is still uncertain. We returned images from all altitudes, just half as many as expected due to the loss of Chain A. The images were lost from the transmission randomly, because our onboard software, not knowing about the lack of power on the RUSO on the orbiter, kept adding to chain A, as well as chain B. If the failure had occurred on the probe, we could have directed every image to chain B and had complete triplets at the cost of fewer panoramas, a trade we would gladly have made, but c'est la vie. We feel grateful and lucky to have even gotten data, considering that DWE got nothing."
Obvious next questions (which I've asked him):
(1) When will those lower-altitude images be released?
(2) If Huygens sent individual frames in each panorama to both channels, how did they get the complete 360-degree panorama at 8 km altitude which was released at last night's press conference?
Still, while he seems unhappy that they got discontinuous panoramas at a wider variety of altitudes rather than complete panoramas at a smaller number of altitudes, I'm absolutely delighted that they apparently did get some really low -altitude aerial views of Titan's landscape as well. I will, of course, let you know immediately when I hear more news on all this. (Also, note his flat statement that the failure came because the RUSO receiver on Cassini had not been turned on.)
Bruce I skimmed through the pdf you linked to. According to it the surface science lamp comes on at 400 meters and the last image is taken at 200 meters The light appears to be on in these images:
http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/triplet.710.jpg
http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/triplet.716.jpg
So it looks like they got at least two images back from below 400 meters. Not much to see in them, I guess the rocks were to small to be resolved at that altitude.
Hi all --
Been lurking here for several months, mostly on the MER boards, but have enjoyed the Titan discussion as well. Thanks.
On the topic of the "official" first image release (the "drainage channel" image at about ~11:50PST (~19:50UTC) on Friday), and the subsequent applause by the gathered officials: I could have sworn I saw the image on the screens of the Huygens mission control room before the official program began. Sure enough. On reviewing the tape, during the live feed of the control room ~3 minutes before official program begins, the image of the "drainage channel" comes up on a couple of the big screens (you even see a couple of people remark on it, though they don't look that excited about it). They then cut to the little ESA / Huygens intro, then there's the whole "event" with Martin Ransom, the "reveal" (without actually seeing the image), extended applause, and that commentary by various officials.
Perhaps I was completely foolish to think that was the first time those gathered individuals had seen the image, but I felt rather misled, particularly when contrasting it with the spontaneity of not only the MER image releases on those first nights, but even the commentary by Carolyn Porco of the Saturn ring images as they streamed down shortly after SOI. I have my problems with NASA TV coverage, but the kind of "staged" release that I saw from ESA really drives me insane, and makes me thank my lucky stars for NASA and JPL.
Anyway, back to the real stuff, which due to the wonders of the web we have in hand (the lack of "official releases" notwithstanding).
Thanks again for all your great insights and imaging work.
In this connection, a question for Lyford: you claim that your (very useful) collection of images at http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/_._.html is a mirror of the raw files that were originally posted at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm before the ESA demanded that they be yanked. But your site lists fully 367 triplets, whereas (judging from the number of links) there were only 16 triplets on that DISR page. What gives?
Bruce, they were all posted in http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/jpeg/ before they were yanked, the web server gave the whole list as a directory listing. The website had (and still has) links to only 16 of them.
In that case, there's still a puzzle -- those 367 triplets included, by definition, 1101 individual frames, and only about 122 of the triplets seem to have been taken after landing, leaving us with about 735 frames on Lyford's site that were apparently taken before landing. But only about 350 are supposed to have been returned before landing (and the original plan, according to http://huygens.oeaw.ac.at/Papers/DTWGRev3.pdf and http://www.rssd.esa.int/SB/HUYGENS/docs/SP1177/tomask_1.pdf , was indeed to return only about 600 before landing and another 250 during the first 10 minutes after landing). So one is virtually forced to the conclusion that there must be one hell of a lot of duplicates on Lyford's site, and thus in the original DISR raw images file. Also, are the 2 to 4 non-triplet individual HRI shots that were supposed to be taken below 500 meters in there somewhere, or were they lost on Channel A?
Nice montage of images at http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/images/050115montage.jpg -- including one which, it's absolutely clear from the context, was taken at considerably lower than 8 km altitude.
It is a mystery about the early release of images at lpl.arizona.edu. I downloaded those images at work at about 3:15 PM CST and as a "CYA" copied them to floppy to take home. I have 11 images, and skipped some of the "duplicate" surface images.
Have the contacts at lpl.arizona been contacted?
My impression of the landing site is being very humid and "drizzly", much like the Pacific Northwest of America. I'm not sure of the hydrologic cycle of methane but I presume that it evaporates, condenses and precipitates like dihydrogen oxide.
--Bill
I have yet to see any atmosphere data?
I'm curious as to what Huygens detected element wise.
We also have to remember that in addition to being transmitted in a lossy way, the "raw" images have also been jpeged, so perhaps there is more low-contrast detail in the originals the DISR team is working with.
never mind - link was already posted
my opinion about the PR stuff (i wasn't online when all the fun started )
ESA should have done better in that respect, but as long as the science is good, you don't hear me complaining much.
I could be wrong, but I thing Europeans aren't nearly as web-based as the americans. I don't think a lot of europeans were watching the webcast. What impressions do you people get about this?
Anyway, I hope ESA will learn from all of this (incl. MEX) and will improve PR. Because in the end, it's the taxpayers who are paying.
Hmmm. Just how much is my continued silence about your ruthless criminal activities worth to you, Lyford?
More seriously: I went over that compendium of 367 triplets again last night, and -- while it's impossible to be absolutely certain, given the number of blank-looking ones -- there seems to be a minimum of 170 triplets actually taken during the descent on it. Since the original plan was to send back about 200 triplets (plus 2-4 single frames during the last few hundred meters), and since that return was halved by the Channel A failure, there MUST be some duplicates in there. (I still haven't heard back again from Bashar Rizk.)
I see a lot of duplicates - perhaps their automated processing was expecting triplets like...
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m
but because some were on channel a - it automatically filled in the expected images with ones it had - so we get
a.a.c.d.e.e.g.h.i.j.j.j.m
Perhaps?
Doug
Check this out:
http://www.futura-sciences.com/communiquer/g/showphoto.php/photo/511/size/big/sort/1/cat/525
Speaking of the channel A loss, any word of what can be recovered from ground based measurements. Or to be more clear, just how much doppler data will we be able to recover?
Ted
I think it would be nice to re-introduce the cartographical convention of the compass rose -- simply stick a tiny medallion or arrow in the corner of these close-up mosaics, so we know which way north (south, east or west) is.
"Titan probe's message not what was expected":
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/57153.php
I quote:
The probe also tipped, losing its sensory lock on the sun - which will make analyzing the components of Titan's mysterious atmosphere a slower process that was originally planned. At first, he said he and his sleep-deprived colleagues in Germany didn't think they'd be able to salvage that data at all.
Why is that? Was the spectrometer supposed to look directly at the sun or something? I don't understand what he means.
I am not sure we know which way is which with any great precision at this point.
I would be interested to know just how the camera frames nest together, if they do at all. That way the surface triplets could be combined into a photomosaic, although the bottom camera images don't appear good for too much after landing, for understandable reasons. Also, how high was DISR off the ground while on the surface. This would depend on how much Huygens dug into the ground, and how it was tilted.
Ted
(1) The DISR team has put the raw images, back onto their site, claiming that they took them down while "analyzing the data": http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm . It's possible that they may have cranked up the contrast from the originals; I haven't done a detailed comparison yet to the originals on "Lyford's" site. (Also, I still don't see the 2 to 4 isolated HRI frames that they were supposed to get between 500 and 200 meters altitude; I suppose they might have lost those on Channel A. I'm awfully hard to satisfy.)
(2) The DISR camera head was supposed to be 45 cm (18 in.) off the ground after landing, assuming that the probe landed upright and didn't sink in. Since it MAY have sunken in a little, the images may be even closer to the ground.
(3) It was stated at the last press conference that the excellent Huygens tracking from those 18 ground radio telescopes (and they showed two graphs to show just how clear the Doppler and VLBI data was) should be able to recover the data lost from Cassini's own Doppler wind measurements "in full", although it may take a while to complete the analysis.
(4) Even if Guillaume did miscalculate Huygens' exact landing spot, his work seems to me absolutely superb, and indispensable right now for anyone interested in Titan.
I would agree concerning William's (to anglicize his name )work, despite the fact he is from that country And before anyone accuses me of being racist, I have travelled to France twice and am actually quite fond of the place...I am just poking fun at current jingo attitudes.
I am more than pleased to hear that we recovered the doppler data on the ground. That I think would have been a greater loss than a random half of the images. Also, does anyone know how the tilt of the lander effected the DISR. I have read that it was tilted a few degrees, but how it was tilted with respect to DISR's location would also effect its altitude. I hadn't realized that it was so low. That certainly, a la pathfinder before IMP was deployed, explains why it seemed to be in a field of giant boulders (although in the case of Pathfinder a few of the rocks proved to actually be quite large).
The best technical description of the DISR anywhere -- including the data on the angular overlap of its three cameras' viewfields -- is at http://www.rssd.esa.int/SB/HUYGENS/docs/SP1177/tomask_1.pdf . There, we learn that there were actually two sun sensors -- one for directional data both to tell which direction its cameras were looking, and crucial for interpreting the atmospheric composition data from its upward-looking spectrometers. (Huygens, however, had backup azimuth information from its roll gyro, which continued to operate throughout the descent.) The other was a solar aureole sensor to allow data to be obtained on the particle size of haze and cloud particles. It's hard to tell which of these the Arizona Daily Star is referring to.
I can't find a reference either in this article or anywhere else to the item I thought I'd read that the DISR would be 45 cm off the ground if Huygens landed on a flat surface without being sinking in -- it's possible I had it mixed up with the very definitive description of the spatial dimensions and angles of those post-landing images which can be found at http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_images_0115.html , and which says flatly that the DISR was about 40 cm above the surface when those photos were taken. (The accompanying size-calibrated photo is direct from the final Hugyens press conference.)
Continuing my monomania about the altitude at which the final returned images were sent: Tomasko's description says that, during the drop from 500 to 200 meters, single HRI images would be taken at intervals of about 8 seconds, with each one sent back immediately. Since Huygens actually hit the surface at about 4.5 meters/sec, it seems certain that it actually had time to take 7 or 8 HRI images during this period -- and once again I find it had to believe that all of them were returned via Channel A. Given the number of duplicated "triplets" on the DISR raw image site, it's possible that some of those last-second HRI images are sitting there falsely mixed in with unmatching "triplets" and unrecognized by us.
Either that or they haven't been released.
Man - been scrolling through the new ones at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/data.htm...
is it just me or are there compression artifacts galore, especially on the descent images?
Is this compression in the raw data you think, or just the web versions? Maybe introduced when they upped the contrast? Maybe that is the compromise that allows the PI's to get first dibs on the good stuff?
Compare triplet 226-
and
Tomasko's description of the DISR reveals that JPEG compression was actually used in the DISR before it sent its images to the transmitter -- in fact, a modified version of JPEG which is mildly lossier was used, to save weight in the system. So, when you JPEG a JPEG, it's not exactly surprising that the quality is somewhat low...
I believe that last sentence contains a typo by Tomasko; he must have meant to say "...the SIGNAL is increased above shot noise..."
Whats that honeycomb pattern on the bottom image of triplet 0?
Possibly some sort of refraction based thing due to a totally out of focus image sent down an optic fibre bundle?
Doug
Can someone please clarify:
Are the images at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/triplets1.htm *exactly* the JPEG images from the spacecraft or have they been JPEG ( i.e. Lossy ) compressed again on earth, meaning that there exist better images, somewhere in ESOC or Arizona ?
well - they are jpg's - so they will have lost some quality from whatever they actually originate by virtue of the JPG process.
Bottom line - if you want the ACTUAL image data - wait 6-12 months and it should be on the PDS
doug
My concern is that a lot of the artifact features are also showing up in public release material, so clearly a good deal of it is really part of the nature of the images.
Yes - but given the time and effort that the scientists need to give this stuff (yet no one seems willing to let them have ) - such things can be reverse engineered out to a certain degree - along with any artifacts of the optical system etc.
Doug
djellison: Please read my question again. We know the images are JPEG compressed once, before transmission from the spacecraft and we will never get back what that lost. My question is, are the images lossy JPEG compressed a second time here on earth, and are there images without this second compression ?
As to giving the engineers time: the internet public has shown it can work faster and produce better images, and if the powers that be give us all the *raw* data, then we can work in parallel with them.
Hopefully this work will capture the world's attention and make them feel their money was well spent. I do not think ESOC have, to date, done enough to make them feel that way, and this should concern everyone interested enough to post here:
Am I just worrying about not making enough eye candy for Joe Public? Yes.
Will how Joe feels about the quality of the eye candy have an impact on future mission budgets ? Yes.
ESA now has the raw images posted, the same overstretched ones you see at DISR
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw/index.htm
Joe Public has seen the picture from the surface, seen the one with the very river-delta looking thing - gone "oo - titan - thats interesting - oo look, Kate Winslet's been nominated twice in the Golden Globes' The general publics interest in this sort of thing if fleeting, and momentary. and gone before they finish reading the 500 words on page 8 of The Times. Everyone I've shown the colour surface image has gone "wow - cool" - and then we're started talking about Kate Winslett again. The public does not and will not care. No ammount of released 500 tiny JPGs is going to change that. Ever.
A routine is in place for all space missions - the data is with the scientists who made it for 6 - 12 months, then it is released to the public at large. Cassini and MER have recently broken that mould with essentially useless JPG's - but every other mission, previous oo present - has done no more than ESOC did for the Huygens descent - Three 'headline' pictures and no more, and thats more than enough for the mainstream media - enough to show joe public - not enough to steal the scientists ( who lest we forget have toiled for two decades to get this data ) thunder on doing science with them.
And the proper raw calibrated data takes time to produce using techniques, technology and information that only the people who built the camera can do. No one else can do that. So, for goodness sake, let them get on with it!!
That we got what appears to be much of the data set in jpg format within 48 hrs is just as much as JPL do with Cassini and MER - if it IS the exact data as transmitted from Huygens - then hell - we're 6 months ahead of ourselves already.
We dont know how the images have been treated ( in the same way we dont know how the MER and Cassini images are treated ) - an 'auto levels' seems to be the most obvious way to get the most out of a murkey image of a murkey place in murkey conditions - result being it looks 'over' stretched. The Cassini auto-processing did it for 2 months - making each and every image of a saturnian moon into a white disk on a black background with no detail inbetween. A few weeks, and a few thousand images later - thats been fixed.
People have put 20 years of their LIVES into making these images - let THEM enjoy them - the proper data will be yours to play with soon enough.
Doug
Well, yes, but I think of the Voyager Neptune flyby. They showed the images as they came down to the ground. And lots of images, which kept the public interested. And come on, pictures simply at a quality that looks good on a television screen are not good enough to steal the science, so to speak. Same with the JPEG releases JPL does. Yes, scientifically, they are useless, but it allows the planetary society and other groups to generate decent looking images to keep enthusiastes interested. It seems like a good way of going about it. I think it is a fair compromise. I am certainly willing to leave measures in place to ensure those on the mission teams get first crack at scientific analysis. But good grief, I'm not a scientist, I am not going to supplant them. And for all their work, without taxpayers such as myself and most of us, whether we be Americans or from one of the ESA countries, they still wouldn't have had a mission, so I think we do have the right to see the results. I think the MER/Cassini approach has proven an excellent way to go, as was the Voyager approach for the pre-internet era. I would actually grant more flexibility to the DISR and Galileo teams...in both cases, one by design and one by the HGA problem, you had teams that had so few images that releasing them at high quality right away (although the DISR team seems to have done so anyway), even as JPEGS, would have left them to be scooped every time they released an image. But we are becoming so awash in images from MER and Cassini that this isn't as much of an issue. The stretching thing helps too, as, once fine tuned, it allows one to get a good look but prevents scientific analysis.
I think part of the reason the ESA held onto the raw images is the result of a bad experience with Giotto the probe that flew by Comet Halley. The first image released was done in false color to emphasize brightness variations which the general public was not able to interpret. Margaret Thatcher called the mission a waste of billions of dollars. The news media just shows the first images released and quickly forgets about it goung back to the latest celebrity trial. Not wanting the public to remember only some bland and grainy images they released only the best they had and held back the ones people would be disappointed by until the media has moved on. About the policy of holding data for six months to let the scientist on the project to study it first I think most of the science will come from the other instruments such as the spectrometers and chromotograph thus releasing the images shouldn't be a problem for them.
Imaging does result in a lot of science. As for basic geomorphology, the "raws" they release are somewhat useful. But as for multispectral analysis, they aren't good for much...for example, beyond being jpegs, you don't know if a patch that comes as red is really blue and is simply less blue than surrounding areas, or is really red, thanks to the stretching. And I think multispectral analysis may be where the greatest discoveries are made.
And remember that many of the 350 lost images would have been from high up where visibility is almost zero and from the surface where practically nothing changes. So the number of lost 'useful' pictures is less than 350.
Does anyone know how long Huygens operated? There are conflicting reports:
- The surface science experiment worked for 3h 37min, including 1h 10 min on the surface.
- Radio telescopes on Earth received a carrier signal even after Cassini turned away from Titan (more than 4h 30min after entry interface). Was Huygens still transmitting data to Cassini at this time? Or only a carrier signal?
Did we miss data because Cassini couldn't see Huygens any more? Or was Huygens already dead?
Analyst
It seems criticizing ESA is becoming a sport these days:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05i.html
While I agree with this ( and J.Bell's ) article in that the press conferences were overly nationalistic and pompous ( poetry... ) I do get the impression that spacedaily just tries to flak ESA because it can.
I mean Bell started reasonable with the complains about the poor quality webcast and endless nauseating compliments to eachother. But then he takes off and calls Europe a backwards, feudal aristocracy and such. And now this article. Again some good remarks about the poetry in the press conference. But whining that the pwetty pictures didn't come first and were not pwetty enough in the end is so incredibly... childish. This author probably never heard of building up tension or holding on to the best things. Not to mention that DISR is only one of the many instruments onboard.
I noticed complains about the picture quality on other forums as well, but as these are the same places where people see dinosaur teeth in mars rocks I can see where those complains are coming from.
Actually, Simon Mansfield's argument was more that ESA built up excessively high expectations in advance for the quality of the DISR photos, and so their actual fuzzy appearance was invariably a severe letdown that is going to unnecessarily turn more of the general public off of space exploration -- presumably in the sme way that ESA's bungling of the live presentation of Giotto's photos of Halley infuriated Margaret Thatcher, with God knows what effect on Britain's later level of contributions to ESA.
But I'm not sure I agree with him -- after all, if ESA HAD made it clear in advance that the Huygens photos were inevitably going to be rather mediocre in visual resolution, that would have turned the public off just as effectively. And ESA handled this latest Huygens press conference far better than it handled the last one -- no bureaucrats stealing the limelight this time (except maybe for Lebreton, Southwood and Diaz taking up the first 20 minutes or so of the p.c., for which I think they can be forgiven. I was actually unexpectedly touched by Southwood suddenly bursting into apparently sincere tears during his statement.) My only real objections to this p.c. were:
(1) ESA still hasn't released, on the web, the various graphs that were shown as slides -- slides that, even at this state, contain some very interesting-looking information, but which were almost impossible to read properly during the Webcast. (More on this subject later, since I've just spent a couple of hours squinting at them on Spaceflight Now's recording of the p.c., and as I said I think there's some quite interesting stuff visually apparent on them that wasn't mentioned verbally by the scientists.)
(2) The really sloppy job the DISR team did on pasting together that panorama, which I myself found to be very interesting and rather dramatic-looking -- but which was so badly put together that the horizon lines in the various frames didn't even match up properly. Christian Waldvogel's version at http://www.futura-sciences.com/communiquer/g/showphoto.php/photo/509/sort/1/size/big/cat/525/page/ is infinitely better. (Despite that, the ESA panorama DID get a round of applause from the reporters -- they weren't THAT disappointed with the photos.)
(3) The last straw, for me, wasn't ESA's fault at all -- it was NASA TV's fault, for cutting away from the p.c. right in the middle of Tomasko's reply to a rather important question to switch back to their endless round of rerun video clips (in this case, a stupefyingly dull clip of some piece of Shuttle equipment being installed, followed by the trillionth replay of the Deep Impact launch.) I came very close to throwing something at my computer screen at that moment.
So: ESA still very badly needs to clean up its act when it comes to its overall public presentations of space science data -- but it wasn't as bad, overall, as Simon and Jeff Bell have made out.
One has to consider ESA's performace w.r.t. the main stream media. The next day's papers, and that evenings news. For that - their performace and output was sufficient. A couple of pictures, a couple of sound bites - thats all that was required. Anything above and beyond that is a bonus for the TINY minority who have a greater than passing interest in it.
Doug
If these two ****** from spacedaily can build a better camera with the technology available 10/11 years ago, have it survive the launch, another 7 years of spaceflight, entry into the atmosphere into a totally alien environment, temperatures of -200 then I think they're in the wrong job.
Yes - sadly, there are some who think that because they can buy an 8 megapixel digital camera on the highstreet there's no reason why you cant put one on Titan.
Jim Bell's articles are best avoided. He's a troll that somehow - is given the title 'journalist'. In the forum of life - he should have been banned some time ago. He gives other, more decent writers ( JimO, Bruce ) a bad name.
Doug
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