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I wasn't "strange", it's what they were able to do with the mass budget they had and the available bandwidth. Over and over again people don't realize how difficult it was to actually land something on Titan that needed to piggyback on one of the heaviest planetary spacecraft ever launched. Not to mention when the Huygens probe design actually started.
It was more than strange: bad optic, misaligned rotation vains at the vessel, funny resolution, grotesque data compression producing weird artifacts... Optical investigation should be the prime objective instead of riddling years around what
not was seen. A crucial problem seems to be in most planetary missions that the deliberatly long plannning, organizing and redefining phases are run over by the technical progress.
I do not see any useful effect of a crummy imager at all. And the Huygens imager is one, that can be proven with the test images gotten during parachuting experiments and even with the photos showing the parking lot under that university building - it is difficult to recognize even the lampposts there.
Besides this, the Huygens camera has nothing to do with the Cassini main craft at all, nothing with flight operations and nothing with landing procedures.
It is a "development" made by several people influenced by these experts of a special German Max Planck Institute which is "famous" for constructing funny but not really functional exotics like the Giotto-Camera. By the way: Their last "progress" could be seen in form of the Rosetta NAC, which shut down during the Steins-encounter. Fascinating, like the Phoenix RAC which is unable to make color photos over a range of three feet due to the limited range of LEDs...
Instead of constructing bunches of not properly intergrated instruments with deginerīs flaws it would be necessary to come to a more comprehensive standard.
Interestingly, years before Cassini launches, someone has decided that the camera would not make it to the ground, so surface imaging was not a topic at all. Without any reason it was determined, that Titan has to be covered by oceans or mud. The Huygens camera sent around 130 identical frames from the surface which are not giving increasing detail after adding due to the coarse compression artifacts. With a small turnable mirror and double resolution, four to ten more useful photos would have been possible showing a partially Titan panorama - with the same Cassini mass and the same bandwith.
"If there would be elephants on Titan, the Huygens imager would not have seen them", as it was stated by a french newspaper, which writer seems not to be payed for that destinct remark.
Furthermore, color imagery is an interesting perspective at all, especially in that strange chemical environment. Which the argument "atmospherical absorption" any color planetary camera could be thrown away, but I am glad that the soviet scientist had put some simple constructed ones onto the Venera lander 13 and 14 at all.