A safe landing for Huygens

[cjolley]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/14/huygens.titan/index.html

chuck

[Dr Mordrid]

First high altitude picture I saw looked like there are flow channels and a coastline

Dr. Mordrid

[Jon P. Inghram]

Too bad the ESA is so anal that they have only released 3 pictures so far. It'd be interesting to watch their outcry if, during the next Mars lander mission, NASA blocked European access to the JPL site and live TV broadcasts and only let them see a couple pictures as a teaser.

It's funny now to remember all the usenet twits who were pissing and moaning about NASA not releasing every damn byte the MER's set back, whining about the greedy Americans not wanting to share, when the ESA had been far worse recently. Hell, Mars Express looks to have been virtually useless if you go by the ESA site, the list of images they've released is so small.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Apparently some people have managed to get the pictures regardless:

http://mars.lyle.org/titan/

http://www.electrasite.com/pano567-nodupes.jpg

http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~ri422/huygens_landing.swf

And here's the home site for the decent imager, it's got some neat pictures showing Earth tests of the cameras to give an idea of the possible quality of the Titan ones: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/

[DukeP]

Apparently they wont release pictures before they have verified them from both datastreams (and done some mumbo jumbo on them).

According to local media, they seem to release pictures at a rate of one every two hours.

~~DukeP~~

[Jon P. Inghram]

Unfortunately they decided to double the image bandwidth and sent pictures seperately over the channels, they lost half of 'em due to one reciever not being activated due to human error (apparently the procedure they gave to JPL wasn't correct.)

All 377 raw images that did make it down are on that first link I posted.