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[Retrospector]

It's wonderful that Huygens was actually able to send pictures from the surface itself. From what I can tell it's still not clear if the pools, lakes, or seas of liquid hydrocarbons are there. I was hoping to see waves!

[remcook]

amazing amateur work is done all over the net. pretty cool that a lot of people are working on these few images

[Orstio]

Huygens landed in mud:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEM5YW71Y3E_0.html

[Astronuc]

Landed with a 'splat".   

Interesting decent profile.

[Qazaq2003]

Amazing, that Huygens landed in some type of frozen "mud" that somehow had enough give to cushion the probe's landing to the extent that the probe survived unscathed, and continued to function for more than an hour afterwards, even including the landing light!  Perfect ending to a succesful mission to visit a totally alien world.   Q

[yale]

This guy needs to go to one of SkyJim's presentations....


Bring back the monkey suit. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make space entertaining.
- Peter Hartlaub
Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Scientists probably had good reason to lose their minds this week over the Huygens probe that landed on Saturn's moon Titan. The distant celestial body no doubt holds the answers to cosmic questions that really smart people have been pondering for decades.

But for many of the rest of us, this latest mission only confirms something we've known for a decade: Space exploration has gotten really boring.

While children once huddled in front of their radios and television sets, waiting for the latest updates on the fates of heroes such as John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, modern space missions all seem to end the same way: with indistinct pictures of orange rocks, followed by impassioned hyperbole from scientist types attempting to convince us how totally awesome the images are.

But for every space enthusiast who gazes at each new monochromatic photo with hard-to-contain glee, I suspect there are a half-dozen others who think it looks like someone spilled an Orange Julius drink on their computer screens. It's hard to reconcile all the talk of mind-boggling discoveries, when the pictures look like they were taken randomly from a car window during a drive from Barstow to Las Vegas.

The less-than-transcendent nature of the interplanetary visuals, of course, doesn't mean the accomplishments aren't important. As scientists talked about prebiotic molecules and liquid hydrocarbons last week, it certainly seemed like something really cool was happening. Unfortunately, many of the details were lost on the 99.98 percent of us without a doctorate in geophysics. It's no coincidence that less than 24 hours after the landing, the orange rocks ceded top billing on national TV to sensational photos of a guy who had shot himself in the head with a nail gun.

Some of this apathy may have unwittingly been caused by Steven Spielberg and Gene Roddenberry, who in their attempts to romanticize space travel in their movies and TV shows have created unreasonable expectations for the real thing. Short of an image of a kindly alien clutching a half-eaten bag of Reese's Pieces, anything that's beamed back from the great beyond is going to be a disappointment. The European Space Agency's online site wasn't helping matters, making little effort to sort out the best images and put them in perspective for the masses.

Space enthusiasts, of course, have been blogging about the probe as if it answered the eternal question from the moment it touched down. But even those most excited about the voyage seemed to subconsciously want more. By Monday, space geeks were passing around doctored Huygens photos that were optimistically colored to look sort of like Luke Skywalker's home planet in "Star Wars." One ambitious fan appeared to give the planet snowcapped mountains. Why not go all the way and conjure up Julie Andrews and her glockenspiel?

No matter how you spin it, sending a man or a woman to the top of Mount Everest is infinitely more fascinating than sending a microwave oven. And as society's attention span gets shorter, space missions have become lacking in the save-the-baby-from-the-well human drama that keeps us from turning the channel to "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." There are many fiscal, logistical and scientific reasons for sending these probes into space -- less than a billion dollars a mission seems like a good deal for those NASA Mars rovers -- but the end result doesn't match the hype that surrounds it.

This isn't a call to end space travel. No doubt there were people 175 years ago who thought those turtles Charles Darwin was toting around were pretty boring, too. But the governments that sponsor these voyages should tone down the Most Exciting Expedition Ever rhetoric, unless they're willing to mix up the hard-core science with some good old-fashioned spectacle.

A few suggestions, just off the top of my head:

Send John Glenn on every mission: Sure, the decision to send the famous, then-77-year-old, astronaut back into space a few years ago had virtually no scientific value. But his journey was still the most celebrated space shuttle launch since the first one, and his voyage was carried on dozens of channels, including one of the cable shopping networks.

Blow more stuff up: If you really want to capture the imagination of children, then think like a child. Upon landing on a new moon or planet, find some scientific excuse to strap a quarter-stick of dynamite and a few Roman candles to the nearest boulder and see what happens.

Bring back the monkeys: When considering the unfortunately low success rate of the early monkeynauts, this plan could end up backfiring. But presuming space travel is a little safer than it was in the late 1940s, the 21st century might be a good time to usher in a new, cuter, era of space travel filled with fluffy animals. Which brings us to ...

Frisbee dogs on Titan: Everybody loves Frisbee dogs. And could you imagine how much air a border collie would get, even with the inevitably bulky life-support gear?

OK, maybe that last one went a little too far. But so has the excitement that accompanied the Huygens landing.

You know your space pictures are boring when even the "Capricorn One"-style conspiracy theorists are keeping quiet. If the government were going to stage a landing on one of Saturn's moons, wouldn't it come up with something better than this?

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©2005 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ

[remcook]

science update tomorrow. check out esa tv (possibly nasa tv too, don't know)

[Orstio]

This guy needs to go to one of SkyJim's presentations....

Ah, yes, the voice of the uneducated (and don't ever want to be) masses.

[Qazaq2003]

Yale,
 The dude that wrote this piece of trash, NEEDS TO GET A LIFE! Unfortunately most people here in Amerika feel the same way to the extent that they regard us as pariahs to be avoided at all costs, after all we live in a country that has a virulent contempt for sound science education. Q

[remcook]

three-part interview with Tobias Owen about Titan:
Part I
Part II
Part III

[remcook]

news from the press briefing:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050121science.html

[remcook]

a lot more titan stuff (and this is only from one source!)

nr 1
nr 2
nr 3
nr 4

[Astronuc]

Anyone see this - Scrambling Effort Saved Huygens Probe

Morning Edition (NPR), January 21, 2005 - The European Space Administration mission to land a probe on the Saturn moon of Titan was saved from near disaster just a few weeks before it arrived. The discovery of a fatal design flaw in the probe's radio relay led to a scramble to save the mission.

[yale]

"Anyone see this - Scrambling Effort Saved Huygens Probe"


http://www.everything-science.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=31&topic=247.msg12918#msg12918

yale

[remcook]

yale, the thing you are talking about was fixed well before "just a few weeks before it arrived". Cassini even made a course adjustment to compensate. but the article seems to talk about the same thing. so I guess the articles is faulted.