And people (press in particular) don't seem willing to give the scientists involved in the mission the chance to sit down and take a really good look at the data and try and understand what we're seeing. The panoramic shot shown at the press briefing was in the words of the PI an "absolute raw" image - something conveniently ommited from the article. Remember those first downsampled navcam images from Spirit? - of course by the time full res colour pans were produced the press had already lost interest lol

Yes - the first postcard from Spirit ( that 3 x 3 frame section ) was probably the last colour MER image printed in the mainstream media.

I'd LOVE a poll of the public - "How many rovers are currently working on mars. 0,1,2" - I'd bet 50% of the public dont even know there's two working rovers on mars right now.

Of course, Janet Jacksons breasts, ex-celebrities locked in a house, and BAFTA nominations are seen as more important subjects. Hell - they even out-run GWB's impending attacks on Iran.

Doug

William Hartmann touches on this subject in his ( excellent ) book 'A Traveller's Guide To Mars'. In a section titled 'yesterday's news' he says:

It's a fundamental flaw in our society's conception of news. The problem is that science and exploration, by their very nature, need time to assemble results. [...]
Nonetheless, TV Networks, newspapers and the public are conditioned to overvalue the first images and first results. Hapless scientists at mandatory press conferences an hour after "arrival" are prodded by rooms full of reporters, who clamor for an explanation as to what has been discovered before any appreciable data have been accumulated. Fickle front pages soon return to the latest murder, fire, earthquake, or sex scandal, and the public is cheated once again.

Are the public really being cheated?

I've often thought that it's all to easy to 'blame' the media -but if what the media presented, in print, and on our television screens was really 'cheating' the public - wouldnt they simple switch off or change channels to someone who wasnt?

Is it more a case that actually - the 'public' dont really care about this stuff? It's impossible to 'wow' the public with a picture from mars when Hollywood shows people walking around and using old russians landers to blast their way home.

This is why I'm often to be heard mentioning the 'sexy'ness of a mission. A mission has to have ker-POW - keZAZ - ka-BOOM factor to wow the public - and unfortunately - they can not ( or dont understand ) fathom the limitations of the technology that have given us what WE consider to be an amazing view from the surface of titan.

It all feeds-back into itself - but there's certainly an argument to be made that all space projects should have a %'ge public engagement budget as mandatory - and that proper data should be in the public domain in very short order.

Doug

Here in German TV the launch of Deep Impact, compared to Cassini/Huygens quite simple, two science instruments ... BUT remember the movie with Bruce Willis, will a comet chrash on earth? ... was almost a bigger story when landing an European probe on Titan. Sad as it is, but targeting a comet, "defending earth", is sexy. Some not so brilliant (for the TV screen) pictures are last hours news.

The media brings us what we want to see, and the hunt for the murder of a german fashion designer was the top story in Germany last weekend. I blame the people first, and the media to some degree.

Analyst

"Jim Bell's articles are best avoided. He's a troll that somehow - is given the title 'journalist'. In the forum of life - he should have been banned some time ago. He gives other, more decent writers ( JimO, Bruce ) a bad name."

Well, first, it's Jeff Bell, not Jim Bell. Second, this puts me rather on the spot, since I'm the one who persuaded him to start writing for SpaceDaily in the first place, and since I think he's very often right. Granted that he overdoes the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang routine (you should have seen what his attack on Colin Pillinger looked like before I persuaded him to tone it down), but I think a hell of a lot of his icon-busting is very badly needed by NASA in particular and by the space programs of the world in general.

And -- contrary to "Sunspot" -- neither he nor Simon were saying that Huygens should necessarily have carried a better camera. Bell's objection was the exact opposite -- that the ESA had not presented its photos enthusiastically enough at first, as opposed to focusing the cameras on various Suits at the press conference -- while Simon's was simply that the ESA had falsely implied that the Huygens photos would be higher-quality than they actually possibly could be, and thus made a lot of reporters unfairly feel that they had been swindled, making them likely to react against the mission.

Oh bloody hell - confuse Jim Bell and Jeff Bell is not something I want to do

His articles often have a valid 'theme' - but they get so addorned with hate hate hate - that it's impossible to take them seriously.

JimO has often made valid criticism of NASA procedure and so forth - but without sounding like he has some massive gripe with them.

Bell just uses so many superlatives and flings so much dirt - his otherwise valid message is lost.

Doug

i have the same feelings about the editor of NASAwatch. often good points, but the way of presenting is not very effective. he seems to have some grudge against the world and when someone makes even a small error he is like a pitbull, in the attack.

Yup - even when something amazing is achieved - they will find SOMETHING to fling crap at - it's pathetic.

Doug

Man - I would LOVE to see that one... I really enjoyed that take on Beagle though perhaps it was only schadenfreude.

I was rooting for Beagle with the rest of us, but I just think there is a cost of doing interplanetary science that you can't avoid. (Better? Faster? Cheaper? Don't you only get to choose 2?) Testing always seems to be cut to save money and that's really where a lot of the failure points and risk is discovered. Hubble mirror? Channel A software error, anyone?

I agree it can seem like "Monday morning quarterbacking," to use an American colloquiallism, and I have dealt with more than one person who can't tell the difference between a digital camera that you take on your vacation to Hawaii and one that goes to another planet (or moon.) But as public agencies, they must be open to public critique and be able to handle a punch or two without folding over.

That being said, I think that space enthusiasts often forget how unenthusiastic the rest of the planet is. We crave every drip of data from these missions like sweet nectar of the gods and most folks are thinking "Conditions like the early Earth? What, like the Garden of Eden?"

This attitude, coupled with ESA and NASA being publicly funded entities, and the general populace's unfamiliarity with basic science or statistics, often leads to unrealistic demands, both in the "I want it now!" vein and the mission profile department - such as anti-nuke folks demanding all rockets be solar powered - even to Pluto, etc.

I for one am happy to live with low res PR image that satisfy my human need to see, whilst not comprising the rights of first dibs of those scientist who have worked their entire careers on this one shot.

Now what was that about Kate Winslet?

Even my other half thought she looked good at the Golden Globes

Doug

I didn't see the Golden Globes, but Kate has always been a favorite. She is one infatuation that is "understood" by my better half; and I can allow her Johnny Depp as well.
Funny, you think we would have seen this movie by now, but we just haven't yet...

BTW, Kate was great in Titanic.

I promise to stay on topic from now own....



edited to add lousy pun

Ok, OT again:

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM15Y71Y3E_index_0.html

ESA press conference on January 21st, 11:00 CET. Yes!

The thing that I think ESA should have been more clear about is that the images returned by Huygens were not intended to be frames like, say, an ISS frame or a digital camera frame, but framelets to be assembled into mosaics. I think they will look quite nice once scientists have had ample time to assemble them, and with spectral data color portions of them. Of course, with the loss of half the images, they might have more holes, but they can still be made into pretty cool mosaics. One reason that amateurs have made better looking mosaics is that they have the luxury of being able to do things like photoshop horizons that don't match and clone image holes, among other things. The DISR team would probably face scorn in the scientific community for releasing images done that way instead of truly aligning them.

And please don't mix Jeff Bell up with Jim Bell Jim Bell is certainly a more agreeable character.

Looks like we will know more about the science results on January 21.

More of Titan’s secrets to be unveiled on 21 January
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM15Y71Y3E_index_0.html

I know - Jim's such a nice guy - he's been amazing via email w.r.t. my mosaic work. I felt like SUCH a prat afterwards

Doug

Yeah, I did some Mars related work with him back in the 90's. Really nice guy to work with.

That's called a brain f*rt; it happens when you get over 30. Depressingly, more and more...

--Bill

I have 4+ more years to go on that and I already have plenty...I'm doomed

Ditto - 4 years to go yet.

Doug

Heck, I can't even remember what pre-30 was like! Well, I can, but this is a _family_ forum...

--Bill

Fascinating stuff.

About your ages, I mean.

Worth a look. Gives a location of Hygens Lander.

http://www.futura-sciences.com/communiquer.../sort/1/cat/525

Don't get too excited djellison. The landing site, according to the guys at the IRC #space room, was just picked at random.

That is not entirely accurate volanopele

One person was claiming different. Do not slam all the people in #space

Some of us are quite modest (not I) and thankful that you visit.

Y

p.s. is centered text the default here?

I wasn't intending to slam anyone. One just has to be careful (and that include me) when stating that they found the landing site. We really need the VLBI data to be sure.

I completely agree

A quote from an interesting article in New Scientist

This week, Zarnecki's group will be mixing up different kinds of crusty stuff and dropping a replica of the Huygens penetrometer onto it, to see what matches most closely. Will they actually try crème brûlée? "We're going to have to - we can't keep using that phrase without knowing quantitatively what it's like," says Andrew Ball, a member of Zarnecki's team.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524833.700

Zarnecki spent some time at the most recent press conference talking about the results of his initial tests along these lines, using wet ground glass with a thin glass crust. It simulated the results quite well, although as he says that doesn't necesarily prove that this was the substance. In particular, I think it's possible that the initial sharp shock when the tip first touched the surface might have been due not to a crust, but to its hitting one of those small ice chunks which it then shoved aside.

Corrrection in phrasing: it doesn't prove, as he says, that something similar to this in texture was the substance. (Needless to say, Huygens didn't land on wet ground glass -- but they used it because its physical consistency would resemble ground-up supercold ice better than wet sand does.)

A new indication that there may indeed be a few as-yet unlreased DISR photos taken from only 500 to 200 meters altitude!

To review the situation: While the last "triplet" image sets from all three DISR cameras were supposed to be taken between 3 km and 500 meters, there were then supposed to be individual downward-looking frames from the HRI taken at 8-second intervals between 500 and 200 meters -- which, given Huygens' 5 meter/sec drop rate, means there would have been time for 7 or 8 photos. Assuming that about half of those were returned on Channel B, that does mean 3 or 4 photos from those final low altitudes -- but I couldn't identify them in the raw frames, and I couldn't get a response from the DISR people on the subject. The fact that all the released raw frames were presented as triplets didn't mean anything -- there were lots of duplicate frames in those triplets, implying that the order of frames from the three different cameras was all wildly scrambled up -- but the movie of the final frames on the ESA site said that the last released HRI frames before landing were taken at either 700 or 500 meters. I couldn't even be sure that they had gotten back ANY HRI frames from lower than that.

Well, Leo Enright -- the excellent space reporter from Irish TV -- has talked with the DISR people and now says on Oliver Morton's Mars blog site ( http://mainlymartian.blogs.com/semijournal/2005/01/alas.html ): "...There are more pictures. But not a lot. Apparently the bandwidth management close to landing means that the final images (three or four, I'm told) were uploaded piecemeal to Cassini and are being processed separately."

He also says: "Marty Tomasko is very laid back indeed about the amateur image processing (http://anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html). Some of it is good, he says, some of it not. He was especially amused by some efforts to clean up what seemed to be camera artifacts: 'They airbrushed out a very interesting crack in one of the rocks!'. The principal criticism of the perspective views is that they are using off-the-shelf mapping software which converts 'shadows' into terrain relief - a mistake, apparently.

"I asked if they had seen any changes in the imagery from the surface over time and they report a single frame where a white object appears fleetingly and disappears again. I assume they are talking about frames 802 and 804 in
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/t2.mov . It's interesting that they are not currently dismissing this as an artifact. Large methane snowflakes?" (Actually, there are TWO white flecks -- one of them quite large -- that suddenly turn up on those two post-landing frames and then both vanish again afterwards. Hard to know what to make of this, but the fact that both of them appear and disappear simultaneously is suspicious.)

Will we see these soon?

Damned if I know -- I'm making further inquiries, on this and several other subjects. (I doubt that they'll show much other than more black goo with small chunks of ice scattered across it, but it will be interesting to see whether there are really small drainage channels running through the mess at this scale.)

By the way, Jonathan Lunine has confirmed to me that those odd little circular markings that keep appearing in the same places in a lot of DISR images are drops of "some kind of condensation", either on the outside or inside of the camera windows. If outside, they are of course liquid methane -- if inside, they might turn out to be drops of condensed water vapor inside the camera.

He also says that it is not, after all, certain that Huygens' GCMS detected no liquid ethane at all vaporized off the surface by its heated inlet -- right now all he can say is that there can't be very much of it in the mixture, which I suppose means that my "dilution of the liquid ethane in all the liquid methane throughout Titan's interior" theory may be vaid.

When I talked to Lunine, I also ended up doing some unintentional scioentific cross-pollinating (not the first time this has happened to me -- why don't these guys keep up with each other's writings?)

I asked Lunine what he thought of Bills and Nimmo's recent theory ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1341.pdf ) that the surprising eccentricity of Titan's orbit may possibly be actively maintained by Jupiter, since the rate at which Jupiter keeps passing Saturn in its orbit is roughly in sync with the rate at which the line of apsides of Titan's orbit revolves around Saturn. It turned out, to my surprise, that he hadn't heard of this theory, which he calls "fascinating". And, as he points out, I was right in my initial belief (which I'd stupidly dropped by the time I wrote to him) that if Jupiter IS actively maintaining Titan's eccentricity, then Titan could be undergoing much more tidal heating by Saturn than has been previously thought -- because the long-time assumption that Titan's tidal heating must be very low has been based simply on the assumption that nothing has been actively maintaining Titan's orbital eccentricity against the circularizing effects of tidal flexing, and that therefore Titan's outer layers must not BE undergoing much tidal flexing. So it may be that Jupiter has indirectly been serving as a mechanism to allow Titan to undergo very dramatic tidal heating after all, driving much more active cryovolcanism there than anyone had thought.

http://homepage.mac.com/yuriwho/huygens_mosaic_big.jpg

Looks like they updated this.

Looks too red.

Great pictures. I think the left part of the overhead mosaic has a few small craters.

I've now talked to Don Lunine some more -- both by E-mail, and face to face when I attended the first meeting of NASA's Solar System Exploration Strategic Roadmap committee. (I'm just back from that, and have some more news which you may hear later.) Lunine's three most interesting comments about Titan:

(1) He told me at the meeting that Bashar Rizk of the DISR team has told him that Huygens did indeed return some images from below 500 meters altitude -- but that their clarity is disappointing for a remarkable reason: Titan turned out to have a significant amount of ground mist even at that low altitude, and after the low-altitude lamp was turned on for the downward-looking IR spectrometer, a lot of its light was reflected back from the haze at the downward-looking HRI imager, like a car's headlights in the fog. I'll talk to the DISR team about this -- but, if true, it confirms that there was indeed a lot of liquid-methane ground fog rising up from the muddy playa floor on which Hugyens landed, an interesting enough fact in itself that it really makes up for the loss of those last photos. It now seems clear that Huygens landed in a cryogenic marsh -- a possibility which a lot of scientific optimists hoped for, but which I had trouble before the landing believing might actually happen. It semed like such an outrageous idea... What a pity the microphone didn't hear the croakings of extremely cold alien frogs afterwards.

(2) Contrary to my fond belief, the inlet on the GCMS -- though heated to fully 90 deg C -- was NOT in direct contact with Titan's surface material but several inches above it (they're not quite sure how many inches yet). Thus its ability to heat the surface was strictly limited, which -- as Lunine says -- could mean that the mud really did contain a fair amount of liquid ethane but (since ethane has a vapor pressure 1000 times lower than methane on Titan's surface) it's simply that not much of it vaporized out of the mud. He says, however, that the GCMS analysis is still just underway, and that it's quite possible that it did detect at least a little ethane from the ground mud after all.

(3) It's still far from certain just what form Titan's surface cryovolcanism takes -- it may turn out to consist not of dramatic actual eruptions of liquid water/ammonia lava, but just of relatively warm but solid ice slowly oozing up to the surface in some places, as is the case for most of the cryovolcanism on Europa and Ganymede. We simply don't have enough information to know yet, but Cassini should provide us with that.

Thanks to a query by Jason Perry (hey, that rhymes...), I've realized that I jumped prematurely to the conclusion that Lunine was talking about ground fog as the source of the near-surface mist that apparently fouled up Huygens' last pre-landing pictures. Jason says the favored theory is just that Titan's atmospheric mist extends all the way to the surface --something quite unexpected. Indeed, Lunine himself didn't say anything about ground fog from the muddy surface as the explanation -- and, in fact, he expressed doubts about Tomasko's belief in a band of ground fog along the playa's shoreline. (Why the blazes didn't they put a simple nephelometer on Huygens? It would seem to be an obvious choice.)

Hindsight is always 20/20. They made the best WAG for the conditions on Titan and instrumented based on the payload capacity and bandwith.



Water ice under Earth conditions deforms plastic-ly in response to pressure. What are the physical properties of ice at Titanian temperatures?

--Bill

The surface ice is as hard and brittle as rock -- but, as with Europa, underlying convective uprisings of "warm", ductile ice could bust up through a thin surface layer (a few km thick) of such brittle ice. In the case of Titan, there may also be significant amounts of ammonia mixed with even the topmost ice, and I don't know what effects that would have on its properties.

We now have a sensational new Huygens near-IR spectrum of Titan's surface, taken from only 20 meters up with the lamp on and the effects of residual methane-biased sunlight removed: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=36529 -- a distinctly different and far more detailed and complete near-IR spectrum of the surface. So far, no dramatic new discoveries have been announced -- but I imagine, just from looking at the detail in this spectrum, that some new constituents of Titan's surface will be identified in it.

I also -- at long last -- have definitive word from Martin Tomasko on the altitude of the lowest returned DISR photos (although he was still uncertain whether or not they've actually been publicly released yet) -- along with some more information on those odd-looking apparent moisture droplets on some of the pictures (which turn out to be something other than what we thought). But, alas, my news on that will have to wait until a possible exclusive story that I'm planning.

fine, be that way!

I just hope I subscribe to that particular publication/website/newschannel when all will be revealed....

Huygens detects geological activity on Titan

Yup -- as the article says, this just confirms what Cassini's own mass spectrometer showed during the first close flyby of Titan.

What's really interesting is that Titan's nitrogen IS fractionated, indicating that Titan has lost much of its original nitrogen atmosphere -- but Cassini's UV and plasma spectrometers show no sign of the expected nitrogen torus in Titan's orbit, indicating that it isn't losing nitrogen at a significant rate NOW. Obviously it lost a lot of its original atmosphere (of either nitrogen or ammonia) at some earlier period. This world's evolution throughout Solar System history may have been quite complicated (as some atmospheric scientists already suspected).

For those who haven't read it yet, here's an interesting article on the Astrobiology magazine.

Investigating Titan's Surface

Thanks for the link. You can also listen to the talk if you wish (sorry, don't have the slides).

Thanks for the link- that's the first real science data I've seen reported on in a while (i.e. haven't heard about the aureole camera results to date, very little about the missing ethane).

Part 2 of Lunine's transcript is up now.

The Missing Methane

Posted on Spacedaily today.

Cassini Images Of Titan Reveal An Active, Earth-Like World

More links:
Saturn Moon Titan Called Earth-Like
Titan is Similar to Earth in Many Ways

Fascinating discription of Huygens result reported at the conference in Houston
http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/titan_lpsc_0819.html