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Math Is Hard
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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.
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.
meteor said:http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMC8Q71Y3E_0.html
First color view of Titan surface
I'm really drooling... I swear it...
it was launched 7 years ago
errorist said: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.
You know one of those el chepo 5 dollar models
Hmm, let's see now ... how does this kind of camera produce an image?errorist said: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.
You know one of those el chepo 5 dollar models
Hey Entropy, pretend I'm from Missouri ... show me! Please pay particular attention to making me confident it will work, after 7 years in deep space, a descent through Titan's atmosphere (you are allowed to work with only what was known 8 years ago, with all its attendant uncertainty), and the (electrical) power and mass allocated (or less; for every 10% less on either, you get a gold star).Entropy said: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.
Reference:DARMSTADT, Germany -- A European space probe Friday sent back the first detailed pictures of the frozen surface of Saturn's moon Titan, showing stunning black and white images of what appeared to be hilly terrain riddled with channels or riverbeds carved by a liquid.
One picture, taken about 10 miles above the surface as the Huygens spacecraft descended by parachute to a safe landing after a seven-year voyage from Earth, showed snaking, dark lines cut into the light-colored surface.
Another image, taken about five miles above the surface, showed light and dark masses, which Tomasko said seemed to be shadows, indicating a varied terrain. The dark areas appeared to be flooded or to have been so at an earlier time.
A third image taken at the surface showed several large white chunks -- boulders or blocks of water ice -- in the foreground and a stretch of gray surface behind them.
Titan is the first moon other than the Earth's to be explored. Scientists believe its atmosphere is similar to that of the young Earth, and studying it could provide clues to how life arose here.
Titan is the first moon other than the Earth's to be explored. Scientists believe its atmosphere is similar to that of the young Earth, and studying it could provide clues to how life arose here.
Huygens was spun off from the Cassini mother ship on Dec. 24 before its descent to the surface of Titan. The mission is a joint effort among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian space agency.
Scientists say they received more than three hours of data from Huygens's descent, and more than 10 minutes of data from the surface itself.
This isn't precisely a color picture, according to http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_images_0115.html :meteor said:http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMC8Q71Y3E_0.html
First color view of Titan surface
I'm really drooling... I swear it...
It would be interesting to know how low-resolution the spectral radiometer was--could they distinguish between the shade of the sky and the shade of the ground, for example?The middle one shows "the general impression of the color from the surface of Titan," according to Tomasko. "There is a slightly orange sky and orange general tone to the material. This is the view you would have if you were standing on Titan," he finished enthusiastically. The color was applied using data from the "spectral radiometer" component of the DISR instrument, which gathers information at a much lower resolution than the imager, so what you see is a wash of color over the black-and-white image.
Here's an image "colorized" using this technique:By dividing the spectra recorded by the downward-looking visible spectrometer (DLVS) into three color bins (Red, Green and Blue) and comparing their intensities with that of a bin covering the same spectral region as that of the DISR imagers (HRI, MRI and SLI), a fairly decent colorization was implemented. Possessing the relatively low spatial resolution of the DLVS (4 by 4 degrees) the coloring of the DISR imagers looks impressionistic, but succeeds in capturing the various large surface units of the images, including the grass, the concrete and the bricks.
JesseM said:The surface image will probably never be super-clear, because Huygens had three cameras, a downward-pointing one, a 45-degree-angle one, and a side-pointing one, and the downward-pointing camera was the highest-resolution while the side-pointing one was the lowest-resolution. On the other hand, they took a whole bunch of pictures of the same scene once Huygens landed, so maybe they can combine the information from all of them into a fairly sharp image.
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.
Well, I got it partly right: "We know that two of the instruments recorded the impact and from those signatures it is looking like we landed in a surface that was neither hard solid nor liquid - something in between." (http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/huygens_results.asp)Nereid said:Goop, slush, Titanic ooze-quicksand, ... a hint of a small rise (solid?) in the distance; no liquid.
for comparison, what is the Mars rover data transfer speed?japam said:s3nno6, acccording to http://www.planetary.org tha data transfer speed is 480 bits per second
s3nno6, acccording to http://www.planetary.org tha data transfer speed is 480 bits per second