The important photographs will be from the descent, not from the surface. The probe was given a rotation when it separated from Cassini, for stability (so it wouldn’t tumble), which means that on its descent through the atmosphere it will have been continuing to slowly turn about. The photographs that will have been taken on the way down will be panoramas (!), i.e., shoot in each of ten or twelve directions on a rotation and assemble the separate shots into an all-the-way-around view. The mission plan was to shoot a number of these while drifting down to the surface, with (IIRC) an increase in shots during the final stage to get a sense of the landscape. The probe itself is small enough that once it lands, it isn’t going to have much of a view of the surrounding area. The wide-field photography will be the good stuff.
Something like that. The B&W can be transmitted more quickly, so they know things are working; the color elements will take longer to transmit.
Dunno. I had NASA-TV streaming on my desktop, but it looks like they’re having traffic problems. I’ll see if I can get it back up.
Actually, let me clarify: The wide-field photography will be the highlight of the imaging. (A light will have been turned on in the last few hundred meters to help.) The really good stuff will be returned by the “spear” on the bottom of the probe, which will have penetrated the surface to permit deeper chemical analysis of whatever it was they landed on. Details on Huygens’s instrument package are here.
Okay, the streaming feed just returned. Images starting to come in. Clicking submit and going to watch.
(By the way, those shots of cheering space engineers that accompany significant successes might just be my favorite thing in the world.)
Preliminary indications are that this mission is a smashing success. This is going to make up in a big way for the significant disappointment of the ESA’s Beagle vehicle on Mars.
The camera takes B&W photos but there’s a spectrometer on board that can be used to fill in the color. I wish I hadn’t lost the cite that information came from, because it showed some really neat pictures taken here on Earth.
My uncle in England said he is watching video from the probe on the BBC, right now. Does anyone know when it will be getting to me? I only have a 56k modem and four TV channels.
I’ve got nothing productive to add except “whoopee!”
I remember being a kid staying up after my bedtime watching the Voyager images from Saturn come down a line at a time on PBS. Today, I’m in front of a broadband internet connection dodging my employer, but the feeling is the same!
Er, make that manned space program, explorers and such…
Incidentally, this explains why the lubrication-less Martians in the American Petroleum Institute’s 1956 promotional film Destination Earth never actually explored Earth in reality. They were getting their greasy goo from Titan…
For anyone with extended cable, The Science Channel (from Discovery) is going to do an hour-long special tonight on the landing. Live, even. 9pm East Coast, 6pm West Coast. More info.
This is actually what prompted my earlier comment about the apparent lack of general public interest. If I were Emperor of the World, this wouldn’t just be way out at the end of the cable guide on The Science Channel. It’d be like on a network, or better yet all of them. More seriously, it would be on Discovery proper, not on their less-watched sister channel.
I can’t be too bitter, though, because this is just so freakin’ cool.
Update - found the cite in re the colorization of the pictures! Someone over at the Bad Astronomy board posted a link to the page, which explains the use of the spectrometer and includes sample images.
