Huygens on Titan

[Elspode]

I don't really want to kick off another "are we wasting money on a space program" dialogue. I just want to say that I think that the successful landing of the Huygens probe on Saturn's satellite Titan is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Incidentally, sliced bread would not be possible without the technological advancement known as a "knife".

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by Elspode

I don't really want to kick off another "are we wasting money on a space program" dialogue. I just want to say that I think that the successful landing of the Huygens probe on Saturn's satellite Titan is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

I thought that was the European space agency. Are we helping fund that?? And, more importantly, how long before someone who lives in a trailer park photoshops the image of Elvis or the Virgin Mary into this pic??

[wolf]

[404Error]

Naw, Radar got there first and sold hotdogs!

...and I don't even live in a trailer park.

[xoxoxoBruce]

When are we going to find something we don't have here?

[Elspode]

Huygens was ESA's lander, delivered by NASA's (JPL's) Cassini, with data transmitted via Cassini from the surface of Titan.

Group effort, humanity benefits, IMHO.

They may well *have* found something there that we don't have here. An ocean of methane on the surface, for starters. Unless I missed something on my last trip to the beach?

[Elspode]

Oh...and the tipping on Titan could scarcely be worse than a couple of customers I had last night...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Elspode

Huygens was ESA's lander, delivered by NASA's (JPL's) Cassini, with data transmitted via Cassini from the surface of Titan.

Group effort, humanity benefits, IMHO.

They may well *have* found something there that we don't have here. An ocean of methane on the surface, for starters. Unless I missed something on my last trip to the beach?

But we have methane and everything else they've found off earth. Hell, we've even got little green men that they haven't found out there. :p

[cowhead]

no this whole cassini trip is something I've been watching with quite a bit of interest.. fascinating stuff.. actually I was just about to head off to the nasa site to see if anything new had come up.. and as to the probe piggy-backing on our rocket.. cooooool... I wanna know more... heh as a kid of course I wanted to go into space, however.. heh... well, plan b..no wait...plan c? uh... no hmmm.. anyway! it's in the alphanumeric system somewhere... I don't want to think about it.. damn I need a drink

[tw]

Originally Posted by Elspode

They may well *have* found something there that we don't have here. An ocean of methane on the surface, for starters.

The earth once was bathed in methane. That is part of the fascination with Titan. We may be looking at an early earth - which does not say Titan will grow into earth.

October's issue of IEEE Spectrum tells another story just as immense as the Huygens landing. The hero is Claudio Sollazzo who worried that Huygen's communication system had never been tested and Sweden's Boris Smeds who fought the bureaucracy to discover the Huygens Cassini communication problem. In simple terms, Doppler effect was not considered during spacecraft design. Once separated, Huygens had to transmit to Cassini that in turn relays that communication to earth. Huygens would enter the atmosphere as Cassini approached Titan. Smeds wanted to duplicate that data AND its varying signal strengths of a modulated signal. Repeatedly, the powers that be rejected the test as unnecessary as well as unnecessarily complex. But mission ground operation manager Sollazzo and project scientist Lebreton supported Smeds requests. Eventually, Smeds ended up in Goldstone CA (Mojave Desert) for two days of tests in 2000 when signals from Cassini took 48 minutes to be echoed. He discovered the radio signal was received, but that data (which bureaucracy said was unnecessary for the test) was distorted and unreadable.

Problem was in NASA's Cassini. IOW an Italian based company that made the receiver had compensated for Doppler effect in the carrier frequency, but had failed to do same to the decoder that extracts data from within that carrier radio wave. NASA had never reviewed the receiver design. The receiver had been designed sufficient for earth orbit but was not sufficient for Doppler effects in a deep space mission.

Cassini was originally to pass Titan 44 times. But the original launch was so accurate as to leave Cassini with sufficient fuel for course corrections. Cassini took a new, lower, and faster orbit of Saturn, dropped of Huygens, and then fired its rockets again to obtain the original course. Therefore Huygens was released from Cassini in December instead of November.

Now the story, as one can see, is quite technical but easily followed by one with basic science knowledge. IOW how many reporters really understood this story? Was Smeds in that Control Room in Darmstadt Germany on 14 January 2005? He should have been in a front row seat. And he should have been one of those stories adjacent to the big pictures from Huygens.

[Elspode]

Three cheers for Smeds!

So, what did they change to make the data useable?

[tw]

Originally Posted by Elspode

Three cheers for Smeds!

So, what did they change to make the data useable?

The original navigation called for Huygens to be entering Titan as Cassini was approaching. This caused the Doppler shift. The navigation change put Cassini passing by Titan when Huygens was doing its drop. That eliminated the Doppler shift.

So many missions have had previous near misses averted by people on the ground. Not only is that the story of Apollo 13. It is also the story of Hubble, Solar Max, SpaceLab, Spirite (on Mars), and so many other research operations. The one factor that so often causes failure is when the little people were denied oppurtunity to make the decisions. This was the reason for both Challenger and Columbia murders. Often stories of how little people saved missions is rarely reported. How many heard about the near disaster for Huygen that was averted in 2000? How many heard about the rescue of Solar Max only a few years ago. Solar Max went on to become one of science's most productive accomplishments.