[X] My Assistant

[Steffen]

Which device made the Huygens probe spin underneath its satellite?
I read that's the way how 360° images were made during descent...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

We got all the radar data (which started at 45 km altitude) even without Channel A. Except for the extremely data-intensive images (without which Huygens' bit rate could have been cut by a factor of 10), all the data was entirely duplicated on both channels, except for a few of the very high-speed surface VNIR spectra obtained just before landing.

We also have good already-published sonar data on Huygens' descent rate during its last 90 meters -- and it shows a nice, steady descent, except for one brief jump of about 2 meters that is thought to be due to its drifting horizontally over a very small bluff.

Really, if any extraordinary jumping around such as you posit had occurred, it would have been mentioned by at leaat one experimenter -- and almost certainly more than one. I've just been going again over the published results from the ASI, DISR, SSP and DWE experimenters -- and not one mentions any such extraordinary phenomena as you mention occurring at ANY altitude. Figure 5 of Lebreton's "Nature" article -- http://www.iwf.oeaw.ac.at/files/lebreton_et_al_2005a.pdf -- shows a graph of Huygens' altitude and descent rate over time as calculated by all onboard instruments, and there are no signs of it ever dropping fast enough to keep the heat shield pinned onto it for more than a few seconds, even given its violent jerking around due to wind turbulence under the big main chute between 145 and 115 km altitude. After that it cut the big chute loose and descended under the smaller stabilizer chute, with the result that its jerking from the turbulence immediately and drastically dropped, and disappeared completely under 60 km altitude -- after which it descended very smoothly all the way to the surface. Fulchignoni's HASI article -- including the data from the accelerometers -- is at http://www.iwf.oeaw.ac.at/files/fulchignoni_et_al_2005a.pdf and makes no mention of any such peculiarities.

Your obsessive pursuit ot this idea is starting to remind me of Captain Ahab, and we all know what happened to HIM.