February 10, 2005
Huygens probe flop turns out sorta OK after all -- good news!
I had written about this earlier here: (item two) I had linked to a Yahoo/AP news item but this link seems to have rotted -- Here is the quote that I had excerpted: bq. Professor’s Saturn Experiment Forgotten David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn’s largest moon. bq. “The story is actually fairly gruesome,” the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. “It was human error — the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten.” Dr. Atkinson’s comment: bq. “In total, the core of our team has invested something like 80 man years on this experiment, 18 of which are mine,” Atkinson wrote. “I think right now the key lesson is this — if you’re looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn’t it.” The data did get sent to earth -- ONLY -- it was sent over a less accurate channel and it seems that using the doppler shift of the signal, people on earth were able to reconstruct the data. The Misanthropyst is all over it and with a cool graphic too -- they quote from an ESA news item: bq. Preliminary estimates of the wind variations with altitude on Titan have been obtained from measurements of the frequency of radio signals from Huygens, recorded during the probe’s descent on 14 January 2005. These ‘Doppler’ measurements, obtained by a global network of radio telescopes, reflect the relative speed between the transmitter on Huygens and the receiver on the Earth... bq. ...Winds on Titan are found to be flowing in the direction of Titan's rotation [from west to east] at nearly all altitudes. The maximum speed of roughly 120 metres per second [430 km/h] was measured about ten minutes after the start of the descent, at an altitude of about 120 km. The winds are weak near the surface and increase slowly with altitude up to about 60 km..."
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