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So, Huygens...
Jan. 15th, 2005 11:05 pmApparently the Huygens Titan probe worked perfectly, but one of the two communication channels was lost because of a screwup in the commands ESA gave NASA for the Cassini data relay. At the time, there were conflicting reports about how redundant the two channels really were. Some of them seemed to imply that no images were going to be lost. It turns out that, in fact, half of the images were lost—probably transmitted flawlessly by Huygens but never received by Cassini. So there are going to be holes in the big panoramas.
In any event, what came back was interesting and still kind of puzzling. There were some pictures of what looked like the shore of an ocean, but the probe actually landed "offshore" and what it landed in was not liquid, but sort of a soft, muddy terrain with little rocks in it. The rocks are probably made of water ice (which is rock-hard at these temperatures), the mud some mixture of ice and hydrocarbons that we know as gases, like ethane and methane. On the other hand, the actual area where it came down has these sort of jumbled streaks on it (it reminds me a little of Boston Harbor seen from the air, with all its harbor islands), so it's still hard to say whether this is really characteristic of the smooth dark zones, and whether there are pools of open liquid anywhere. I was half-expecting the probe to just send back hundreds of pictures of a boring ice plain, so this is pretty cool.
Most remarkable to me: The imager was designed to get panoramas by just continuing to shoot as the probe spun around and descended. So after it hit the ground, the probe actually shot a whole lot of frames of the final surface image, and they've been collected into an animation... and you can just barely see something that looks a lot like raindrops sliding diagonally across the lens. Ethane drizzle, maybe?
In any event, what came back was interesting and still kind of puzzling. There were some pictures of what looked like the shore of an ocean, but the probe actually landed "offshore" and what it landed in was not liquid, but sort of a soft, muddy terrain with little rocks in it. The rocks are probably made of water ice (which is rock-hard at these temperatures), the mud some mixture of ice and hydrocarbons that we know as gases, like ethane and methane. On the other hand, the actual area where it came down has these sort of jumbled streaks on it (it reminds me a little of Boston Harbor seen from the air, with all its harbor islands), so it's still hard to say whether this is really characteristic of the smooth dark zones, and whether there are pools of open liquid anywhere. I was half-expecting the probe to just send back hundreds of pictures of a boring ice plain, so this is pretty cool.
Most remarkable to me: The imager was designed to get panoramas by just continuing to shoot as the probe spun around and descended. So after it hit the ground, the probe actually shot a whole lot of frames of the final surface image, and they've been collected into an animation... and you can just barely see something that looks a lot like raindrops sliding diagonally across the lens. Ethane drizzle, maybe?
