After seven years of travel, this piece of technology has managed to land safely on a tiny, tiny speck in the sky. Pretty good stuff!
The image shows what is speculated to be a shoreline and some channels. ESA is planning to release more images the coming hours/days.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I looked earlier and the "first image from Titan" was a different picture. They probably took it down because you could see the Crystal City in it.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Albeit unprocessed and small and grainy and probably only useful if you use spectrometers for a living, but check it totally out anyway.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
There have been curious bandwidth problems, and some sites have in fact pulled pictures - including the most interesting one to date, apparently showing a Titan landscape complete with liquid-eroded rocks, boulders and ice. Looks like the ESA wasn't as ready as JPL was last year when the rovers hit Mars - they'll be working overtime this weekend getting some great new images to us.
What's really amazing to me is that the features everyone was looking so hard to find on Mars - water erosion, hydrographic evidence, etc. - is present in spades on Titan. There are valleys, channels, and apparently shorelines. As a professional geographer, I'm thoroughly fascinated by this REMOTE remote sensing, as we can say in this industry.
I'm really interested in the third picture, which shows the view from 8km up. I didn't know what I was looking at until I turned my head sideways - those are NOT mountains, but the variety of landscapes on this tiny moon is seriously cool.
And these panoramic shots are just fantastic. A birds-eye view of another world!
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
A hopelessly color-blind bird, though.
(OH SNAP!)
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
But it can fly a few billion miles through the interplanetary void. That has to count for something.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
As long as it doesn't crap on my car, it's cool.
Man, even after all the politics and frustration of a very limited space exploration, something like this comes along and makes me a believer again.
Just think of all we could accomplish in future years by sending this same kind of probe to the other moons in our solar syatem: I really want to see proof of a liquid ocean on (under the ice technically) Europa in my lifetime.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
My only real annoyance with Huygens so far is ESA's policy on information release. Unlike NASA/JPL, which basically releases everything to the public as soon as they get it into a manageable format, ESA prefers to hold everything close, process it, let their guys analyze it first, and THEN let the public and the other eggheads have their turn. It's a selfishness borne of the simple fact that they have fifteen member states and the politics and bureaucracy involved trickles down even to the base release levels seen here. This is why, while JPL was on the recieving end, everything got sent straight to ESA and they got rather angry when someone at JPL posted an image before they got the go-ahead. We'll get the data eventually, but until then we're stuck with waiting for the choice images and data to be released first. I wonder if the best images are yet to come or not.
OTOH, the ESA bureaucracy has already revealed a problem, as a poorly-worded or confusing set of instructions to the JPL guys caused some data transfer protocols on Cassini to be improperly configured, resulting in some of the Huygens data to be lost. They're trying to piece together what they lost from tiny bits of data captured directly at recieving stations around the world, but I understand there are few real hopes. While I too was hoping that this mistake wasn't made, it serves to demonstrate just how differently ESA and NASA operate.
Mark
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Well, as long as they didn't forget the difference between feet and meters again...
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Dude, that was NASA.
Mark
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
The latest:
Clouds, islands, beaches! I mean, holy shit. THIS is what we didn't get on Mars, and it's all RIGHT THERE.
Mark
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
That's going up on my wall. Niiiice image...any idea as to the altitude that was taken at?
Posted by Nim' (Member # 205) on :
Phunnie, if you do a "negative image" on that last picture, it looks totally like the south pole.
Is that pic available in a larger size?
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
I am totally planning to have my next vacation there.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Now we know why the ESA is behind this! The Germans will totally have hogged all the good deckchairs before the rest of us get there. . .
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Ironically, the Germans are a part of the ESA that is against the use of nuclear power on its spacecraft - something pretty well essential if you want anything more than a few fuzzy pictures of the place.
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