Huygens Office Pool Bets: Friday's Options

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The discussion revolves around the Huygens probe's landing on Titan, with participants expressing excitement and anticipation for the data received. Initial predictions about the landing site being solid were confirmed, as images showed rocky terrain with no visible lakes, although some speculate about the presence of hydrocarbon lakes. Concerns about equipment failure were raised, but the probe successfully transmitted data, albeit fewer images than expected due to a channel failure. Participants debated the use of color cameras on the probe, highlighting the challenges of space technology and data transmission. Overall, the mission is viewed as significant, providing valuable insights into Titan's geology and atmosphere despite some disappointment in image quality.
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Bets for Friday?

Solid planetfall?
Liquid planetfall?
Equipment failure?
 
Astronomy news on Phys.org
solid.
some.
 
Solid, no lakes near landing site.
 
Lakes of water emitting methane gas due to rotting vegitation. Volcanic mountains sticking out of the water with algae growth all over them. Tidal forces causing all of this. It is a moon at the right distance from Saturn for life to form. :rolleyes:
 
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Likely solid, but still some chance of nearby liquid. Either way, it will be cool.
Please, please no equipment failure! This opportunity won't come again for a long time.
 
Equipment failure is always a good bet.
 
Goop, slush, Titanic ooze-quicksand, ... a hint of a small rise (solid?) in the distance; no liquid.
 
Solid.

Will stop transmitting successfully two minutes before the calculated moment of contact with said solid surface.
 
Huygens has landed!
First data should be received this afternoon!
 
  • #10
I won, unfortunately :-(

Rocks, no lakes near landing site.
 
  • #11
Cool. I just saw the first image [view from 10 miles above Titan]. Looks like the amazon river delta emptying into the Atlantic ocean.
 
  • #12
Check here, raw images:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm
 
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  • #14
what the hell.. no little green men?!
 
  • #15
So are there indeed ethane oceans down there?
 
  • #16
s3nn0c said:
Check here, raw images:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/data.htm

All the pictures are dead links now :cry:
 
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  • #17
Too early to say.
 
  • #18
Oh, damn, really, links are dead... Give me an FTP, I can upload them. 518 KB needed.
 
  • #19
s3nn0c said:
Oh, damn, really, links are dead... Give me an FTP, I can upload them. 518 KB needed.

can u just upload them to www.imageshack.us ?
it's free and really easy
 
  • #21
Chronos said:
Try the ESA site
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

The esa site only has 3 pictures up. There were links to about a dozen images on the other site...

check want pictures now! :-p
 
  • #22
Is it just me or do some of the 'rocks' in that surface photo appear to be submerged in a shallow pool?
 
  • #23
Thx for link, check.

http://img40.exs.cx/img40/3086/landing01h5rp.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/981/landing02h7co.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/7760/landing03h6jt.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/1218/triplet24rs.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/1629/triplet134xu.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/4730/triplet363ub.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/7619/triplet445iw.jpg
http://img21.exs.cx/img21/4258/triplet781jr.jpg
http://img125.exs.cx/img125/3456/triplet894lo.jpg
http://img125.exs.cx/img125/4882/triplet1840xs.jpg
http://img125.exs.cx/img125/1351/triplet1945gn.jpg
http://img125.exs.cx/img125/6581/triplet2533ud.jpg
http://img25.exs.cx/img25/4220/triplet2756ux.jpg
http://img25.exs.cx/img25/4315/triplet4368tc.jpg
http://img25.exs.cx/img25/3479/triplet4533cg.jpg
http://img25.exs.cx/img25/1123/triplet4644wz.jpg
http://img25.exs.cx/img25/323/triplet5415mq.jpg
http://img116.exs.cx/img116/313/triplet6713hr.jpg
http://img116.exs.cx/img116/6099/triplet9125fn.jpg

"Special" thanks for ESA... Sorry, guys, our european scientists definitely don't know how to use popular media.
 
  • #24
so uhm.. party on Titan?
 
  • #25
It seems Huygens made it all the way to the surface without failing. I am happy to be wrong in my prediction.
 
  • #26
I'm happy too. I'm a little dissapointed one of the channels failed so they only got back 350 pictures instead of the 700 or so they were expecting. Oh well... that's still awesome.
 
  • #27
actually i heard they foobared that whole thing with frequency because some engineer put wrong frequency in there and they had to adjust for it by changing the speed of descent? what was the story with that
 
  • #28
They got all the pictures back they just are not telling us.They have numerous back up channels built in just in case they lose one. Liars!
 
  • #29
Still don't understand how why they couldn't put color cameras on the probe.

Anyways, I'm a little disapointed with the results, don't know why. Surface pictures look exactly like Mars and Venus. Except for that picture it took during the decent that looked cool. Hopefully the chemical anaylsis stuff will be more interesting.
 
  • #30
cronxeh said:
actually i heard they foobared that whole thing with frequency because some engineer put wrong frequency in there and they had to adjust for it by changing the speed of descent? what was the story with that

No no, the firmware on Cassini was not adjusted to deal with the Doppler shift due to the velocity difference between Huygens and Cassini. The software was, but the firmware wasn't. So the engineers got by adjusting Cassinis velocity/heading and by changing when Hugens undocked from Cassini.

But why Channel A failed is still being worked on.
 
  • #31
Entropy said:
Still don't understand how why they couldn't put color cameras on the probe.

Anyways, I'm a little disapointed with the results, don't know why. Surface pictures look exactly like Mars and Venus. Except for that picture it took during the decent that looked cool. Hopefully the chemical anaylsis stuff will be more interesting.

It might interest you to know that they don't have colour cameras on the Mars Rovers either...
They have black and white cameras with filters for different wavelengths on them that they later combine to form near true colour images.

I'm not sure if Hugens has these filters or not.. probably not though.
 
  • #32
It might interest you to know that they don't have colour cameras on the Mars Rovers either...

Last time I looked at a Mars photo I saw red soil, brown rocks, a blue sky with a yellow sun rising.

I just wanted to see a good color photo of what's below all that yellow hase. I'm just shocked that we can sent a hunk of metal half a billion miles into space and land it on a tiny chunk of rock spinning around the sun at several thousand miles per hour and not seem to be able to stick a color camera. They can put a color camera on my sister's phone that can save 5 minute of film but the ESA can't put a color camera on a space probe?! We had color cameras when we landed on the moon for crying out loud!
 
  • #33
We had color cameras in the 1950's for cryin out loud. I get better pictures at Wal Mart for cryin out loud. I agree with you.
 
  • #34
Entropy said:
Last time I looked at a Mars photo I saw red soil, brown rocks, a blue sky with a yellow sun rising.

I just wanted to see a good color photo of what's below all that yellow hase. I'm just shocked that we can sent a hunk of metal half a billion miles into space and land it on a tiny chunk of rock spinning around the sun at several thousand miles per hour and not seem to be able to stick a color camera. They can put a color camera on my sister's phone that can save 5 minute of film but the ESA can't put a color camera on a space probe?! We had color cameras when we landed on the moon for crying out loud!

Dude, did you read the rest of my post about how they take colour pictures on Mars?

Anyway, the Colour pictures from the moon were from film cameras that the astronauts used. I'm pretty sure all the other landers on the moon before were all black and white and if there were any colour images it was because of filters. I think the reason lies in the fact that you can get much more valuable scientific data if you filter out certian wavelengths... Also, it's much easier to compress greyscale images (and cheaper/lighter to built b/w cameras).

Any space engineers want to back me up?
 
  • #35
errorist said:
We had color cameras in the 1950's for cryin out loud. I get better pictures at Wal Mart for cryin out loud. I agree with you.

You want to send 700 5-megapixal full coloured uncompressed images over an antenna about as powerful as a cell phone to an orbiting satellite several thousand kilometers away and then transmit that back to Earth 1.2 billion km away in a mission designed to last for 3 hours?

BTW, these first images are the raw, unprocessed low res images. There are higher resolutions pictures that will probably be put up later.
 
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  • #36
Maybe we've been hornswaggled - a la 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'. That Huygens probe always looked suspiciously like a Jiffy-Pop popcorn container to me. :biggrin:
 
  • #37
http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens <--amature mosaics

http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/j/raw/_._.html <--raw images

Animation from raw images (I stared making my own till I found this one:
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/huygens1.gif
Holy crap, there's something flying around down there! :confused:
:-p
And an animation I made. http://img51.exs.cx/img51/241/animation342uy.gif (lossy)
 
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  • #38
Another waste of a space mission, pictures of rocks wow, i hope
this is the last, and maybe the time money can be spent on whats
really going on out their.
 
  • #39
Wolram.

I think the pictures that has been produced (at least to us) are not the final ones, and i hint that there are indeed hydrocarbon lakes on Titan.

So by no means is it a wasteful mission.
 
  • #40
wolram said:
Another waste of a space mission, pictures of rocks wow, i hope
this is the last, and maybe the time money can be spent on whats
really going on out their.

This is how we learn about things Worlem. If people didn't research the ‘mundane’ Mandel Gregor would never have come up with his theory of genes from studying peas and Faraday would not have invented the electric motor after playing with magnets.

Having said that, I in no way think that this was mundane.
 
  • #42
http://homepage.mac.com/lyford/ramm/pano567-nodupes.jpg
 
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  • #44
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just send a Kodak camera from Wall Mart. It would be in color and the resolution would be a million times greater. :bugeye: :bugeye: :bugeye:

You know one of those el chepo 5 dollar models
 
  • #45
Make a time machine, buy a camera and send it back to 1996.

BTW, do you know the data transfer speed between Huygens and Cassini?
 
  • #46
wolram - Huygens did more than just take pictures. It also took many atmospheric measurements (physical, chemical, photochemical, magnetic) on its way down to the surface. The photos give broader (although less detailed) information regarding things like geology, "hydro"geology, etc. Huygens is also just one part of the overall Cassini mission.

errorist - - They can't just put the latest technology on spacecraft . There is several years testing & modifications required to make sure each component can survive liftoff, survive the journey (temperature, radiation, etc.), and survive the landing. Plus, like s3nn0c said, it was launched 7 years ago. So, 7 years plus a few more for testing/modifications is the technology level you're working with. Just think how far computers have come in the past 10 years.
 
  • #48
I am sorry, but these missions, will tell us nothing about our origins
and the basic things we need to know about our origins, what is space,
what is gravity, what is energy, these are the basics we need to
understand, not what the composition of some rock is, i say spend
the money on disproving some of the semi crackpot theories of
accepted science.
 
  • #49
it was launched 7 years ago

Yeah 7 years ago with a multi-million dollar budge! With a few million dollar back in '98 you think you could make something that atleast produces images with quality on par with a cheap-ass cell phone camera, and it doesn't even need to fit in a little cell phone.
 
  • #50
A 360 degrees panoramic showing the landing site...
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/images/050115montage.jpg

The white features are not snow, as I have read somebody suggest. They are probably low altitude clouds

With respect to the mission, I can't see how can be trivial: is the farthest landing ever made by a human probe...
 
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