Huygens' Titan Descent

E

epicstruggle

Passenger on Serenity
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http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_descent_comm_050114.html
Huygens speaks from Titan! ESA has confirmed that the Green Bank Telescope successfully detected Huygens signal tone. The signal, a confirmation that Huygen's transmitter is functioning, activated on time at about 5:18 a.m. EST.

About 600 people are at ESOC mission control for Huygens Titan descent and some engineers crowded around computer monitors when the signal confirmation was announced.
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Hope everything goes off properly.

epic
 
part of the update from space.com
6:45 a.m. EST: ESA officials say the mood at ESOC has eased with the Huygens signal detection by West Virginia's Green Bank Telescope. Nail-biting tension has been replaced with some relief, though Huygens mission scientists are still eager to learn if their science instruments are taking measurements as designed.

"We're now just waiting for Cassini," John Dodsworth said earlier.

6:15 a.m. EST: With the confirmation signal from Huygens in hand, ESA officials know the probe is currently floating down toward Titan under its main parachute. It will jettison the parachute as it descends and deploy a smaller, three-meter parachute in order to reach the surface before onboard batteries run out, mission managers said today.
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well everything looking good. Scientific data should be streaming back within the next 2 hours.

epic
ps am i the only one interested in this? 8)
 
No, I think I, like many others, prefer to read the results when they're in. Step by step stuff makes me bored and the results coming in without analysis seems like a step in the process more than an achievement. Plus B3D is quiet today... no l-b
 
F'ing hell, they've flung a device over a billion miles to land on some ultra-cold moon and the thing will be transmitting data...this stuff always amazes me. Btw, does anyone know the power output of that antennae?
 
I, for one, am excited. The design goal was 3 minutes on the surface, but it landed and kept transmitting data for a couple hours.

I read on another forum that the first pics will be released at 2:45 eastern time; that's about an hour from the time I made this post.
 
GwymWeepa said:
Btw, does anyone know the power output of that antennae?
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thi is all i could come up with:
Radio Frequency Subsystem

The Radio Frequency Subsystem, together with the antenna subsystem, provides communication functions for the spacecraft to and from Earth. Part of the radio frequency subsystem is also used by the Radio Science Instrument. For telecommunications, the radio frequency subsystem produces an X-band carrier at 8.4 Ghz, modulates it with data received from the Command and Data System, amplifies the X-band carrier band-carrier power to produce 20 Watts from the Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers (TWTA), and delivers it to the antenna subsystem.

The parts of this subsystem used for the radio science instruments are: The High-gain Antenna (ANT), the Ultra Stable Oscillator (USO), the Deep Space Transponders (DSTs), the X-band Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers (X-TWTAs), and the X-band Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier.

Antennas

The Antenna Subsystem consists of the High-Gain Antenna (HGA) and two Low-Gain Antennas (LGA-1 and LGA-2). The primary function of the high-gain antenna is to support communication with Earth. It is also used for S-band Huygens Probe Science, Ku-band RADAR, and Ka-band Radio Science. The high-gain antenna is a Cassegrain antenna consisting of a 4-meter (13.1-foot) parabolic primary reflector, a sub-reflector mounted in front of the focal point of the primary reflector and the feed horn.

To prevent the harmful rays of the sun from reaching the spacecraft's instruments during most of the early portion of the long journey to Saturn, the high-gain antenna was pointed toward the sun, functioning as an umbrella. With its most powerful antenna not pointed toward Earth, the spacecraft used the low-gain antennas to exchange information with ground controllers. Low-gain antennas provide omni directional coverage allowing relaxed spacecraft pointing requirements, as opposed to the high-gain antenna, which must be accurately pointed Once Cassini-Huygens was far enough from the Sun, it finally began using the high-gain antenna for communicating with Earth, thus achieving much faster transmission rates.

Distances and Data Rates

When Cassini is in orbit around Saturn, its distance from Earth will vary from 8.6 to 10.6 AU (1.3 to 1.6 ×109 km). Radio signals will take from 68 to 84 minutes to travel between the spacecraft and the ground station.

Depending on the mission phase, the data transmission rate will vary between 5 bits per second and 249 kilobits per second.
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I saw the first pic on nasa tv. From 16 clicks up, it shows what appears to be drainage channels and a shoreline. :D
 
ZoinKs! said:
I saw the first pic on nasa tv. From 16 clicks up, it shows what appears to be drainage channels and a shoreline. :D
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Yeah, loved it. The ESA really needs to learn how to do these things properly. Not sure why they only released only one pic. I dont care how hazy the other pics might or might not be, just release it. :)

epic
 
First image from the surface:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic2.html

050114huygens2.jpg
 
:oops: Beautiful, wow. good to see more pics slowly being released.

more (just the 2 pics plus commentary) at:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_images_050114.html

The first image, taken from an altitude of 16 kilometers, has a ground resolution of about 40 meters, said Martin Tomasko, principal investigator for Huygens' Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer. Tomasko said Huygens teams now have about 350 pictures to work with.

Huygens originally was expected to send more than 700 pictures taken during its 2.5-hour descent to the Titan surface. But one of the two communications channels on the satellite apparently malfunctioned, cutting by about half the number of images received by NASA's orbiting Cassini satellite and relayed to mission control here.
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damn.....i am dead tired and i cant stop looking for more pics.....
man.... this aint some corny SF flick, this is real world.....billions of km's away....
 
As far as i understand it the pictures are not only hazy but they're no real pictures at all before extensive post processing.

BTW, it seems that only one of two transmission channels was working.
 
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