During the entire descent, Huygens will capture and relay to Cassini 1100 images...... so 550 is not bad, i dont know if its the first 550 or last 550 wich may have been lost???....hopefully we still get the full descent...


http://www.planetary.org/saturn/huygens_mission.html

Some panoramas are in Channel A, some are in channel B. So we will have whole panoramas, just half of those planned. At least that's my understanding after the status report telecon.

see, look on the bright side. The way I understand it, the panoramas are interwoven, as above, ABABABAB. We may have lost more high altitude panoramas than lower altitude panoramas. But it is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

The first pictures of Titan's surface will be released by ESA about 2:45 ET.

BTW, does anyone know the time that the Huygens signal was lost on Earth?

Does anyone know how the DISR images are to be connected...e.g, will loosing half the data mean the loss of all data in one direction consistently throughout descent, or will it be more random.

Ted

Is the A-channel totally borked - is itt just a bit screwey and thus potential for recovery

Doug

The loss of one channel will mean they will lose entire panoramas, but other panoramas will reamin intact since they are entirely on Channel B.

Yes, but do you mean 360 panoramas or shorter panoramas that will be assembled into mosaics?

Consider it like MER. As I see it - you'd have lost the Lion King panorama, and the Endureance Pan Point A Panorama, but the Mission Succes Panorama, the first Endurance Panorama and the Burns Cliff panorama are ok

Doug

Looks like channels!!!!

A shoreline? River channels?

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050114pic1.html

That DISR image I just saw was much sharper than I imagined it would be. The features there were described to look like drainage channels.

HOLY CRAP!!!!!

Can't wait to see more images. WOW !!

The dark, smooth part on the right looks like a lake of liquid. The squigly lines remind me of a Viking image of Mars showing dried up streams.

I want to say that that image literally brought tears to my eyes, being so beautiful and so much of what I'd hoped for. Thanks, Huygens!



Not sure if we're looking at the same image or not, but if we are, then shouldn't those channels (and they can hardly be anything else) be flowing into the "lake" and not away from it, if it actually were a lake? Maybe it's more like a glacier?

I was the same. It sent shivers down my spine - it was just beyond anything i could possiblt have imagined.

Doug

looks like a delta to me

other possibilities that are coming up are volcanic outflow channels and rain drainage from the last equinox rainy season

First image from surface !!!!!

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...fm?imageID=1298

First image from the surface!

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygen...CXM71Y3E_1.html

Looks like the bastard love child of Venus and Mars

doug

A shoreline? Out there? Okay, it's bitterly cold and not water at all ... but I love the sea and I love lakes, too. I hope *so* this turns out to be a liquid! I'm so thrilled, guys!

Not even Europa has a shoreline!

Tom

From John Zarniki (sorry about the spelling)

3 hrs 27 mins and 26 second data in all

1hr 10 minues of data from the surface of titan

Doug

Wow, look how rounded those cobbles are! Maybe the hour+ of surface images could be stacked to improve the resolution.

Yeah - a thick atmosphere might give a slight bit of motion to the image - perhaps super -res imaging on it

Doug

I can't believe that. No delta on earth has outflow channels that get smaller as you go downstream.



Maybe, but I find it hard to see volcanic outflow coming off what looks like multiple watersheds. This looks like a typical earthly drainage pattern.



We know enough about Titan now to know if it has rainy seasons? You're pulling my leg, right?

That surface picture -- well, I was wrong about the oozy tar pits. At least, we didn't land in any. But what's that off on the horizon? Does it look curved because of (1) the optics, (2) because there's some kind of humped formation out there? Oh for a rover!!!

OMG, that is a classic fourth-order dendritic drainage pattern. That is a river. Idea of the scale of this pic?

--Bill

I would dearly, dearly love for that to be a shoreline and a lake or sea -- just so you know where my biases lie -- but unfortunately I think I see a crater or two in the "lake". If I'm right about the drainage, then the "lake" has to be significantly higher than the surrounding terrain. Could it be, say, the lobe of a (cryo-?)volcanic outflow?

It sure reminds me of the Venera 9 pan. Superficial, but it looks like it. As for the channels...that depends...might this be some sort of a murky delta? That would explain the large channels breaking into a bunch of small ones. The features in the lake could be craters on the lakebed poking through the surface, or, if they are not craters, they may be islands or sand/mud bars,

Triplets posted!

I think to some extent that has to do with looking out on a kind of bleak overcast landscape on both Venus and Titan. But the details are quite different; on Venus, we had a wholly rocky surface split into sharp-edged slabs; here we're looking at a "sandy" plain (who knows what that stuff is actually) strewn with rounded boulders. It's more reminiscent of Mars, though the rocks are not shaped like the usual volcanic and impact debris we see on the Martian plains.

Cody, what did you mean with triplets ? Image mosaics ? where could it found ?

Click on the link above.

Wow, quite a hazy trip down it appears. Some of those views in the triplets could easily be delta areas on the Earth.

Is number 671, top, a view from low altitude looking across the channels toward the horizon? That's the impression I get. If so, I should like to see it with a bit of enhancement -- it should be very interesting.



Just click on the word "Triplets".

HOLY COW.

I'm completely speechless with the few images we have so far. We need a longer duration mission to Titan. NOW!!!

I'm guessing it will not take the scientists very long to start lobbying for one.

Anyhow, once these images are processed, and Huygens' position is determined accurately, will we be able to Have Cassini reimage the landing area in high resolution so that we can correlate ground truth with Cassini's observations? Doing so would allow better inferences about OTHER areas that Cassini observes.

wow, I just got back from looking at those

Certainly fluids had a hand in this terrain and we landed in material best described as creme broule (I know I misspelled that)

I shan't be satisfied with anything less than a half-dozen orbiters and two or three rovers.

Seriously, it's going to be tough lobbying for another Titan lander though we clearly need one. At the press conference they were saying that they don't expect to see another one in their lifetimes (and those guys aren't that much older than me! ). This is going to have to be very, very carefully packaged and sold, and unfortunately has to compete with better-funded and flashier programs.

Compare these...







[The one in the centre]

Two questions....are those compressed versions of the images, and is this the complete Huygens set?

There are many more photos to come. During the ESA press conference, it was mentioned that they already had received 350 images, partway through transmission from Cassini. The ones released so far are merely the first wave of photos.

I'm just going to go "wtf" for a while

One part of this looks like a a river catchment area starting at a coastline and working inward...



And another part - just a little further down the coast ( we drifted along this costal feature - we have views from both sides of it )

We have amore classical river channel



I will keep saying WTF till we have a follow on misison

Doug

Just playing with brightness/contrast on some of the raw images:

http://img9.exs.cx/img9/4122/titancollage0lb.jpg

Eric

Go here: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/jpeg/ to see lots more triplets. Many of them seem to be duplicates, though.

Is it feasable that it landed in a small puddle?



That bottom image looks a lot like a shallow puddle - with something sort of sandy in the bottom and pebbles in it - with a torch held next to it

Doug

I find it interesting that we see plenty of smaller impact craters in these images, compared to what appears to be a lack of larger impact craters on a global scale. At the very least, this should help dating the features we see in the images.

What look like small craters are aparently image artifacts or dust or something. They are in the same place in each image regardless of where the camera is pointing.

You're right, of course. That was stupid of me. I should have noticed that.

Right. Well, that detracts from my reasons for supposing that the "lake" was not liquid. I'd still like to see some unambiguous images of the rivers (can I call them that now?) flowing into the "lake".

And if we have that, I'll be happy as a clam to take the quotation marks off.