I was reading this story about the appoach of the Huygens probe to Titan. It is scheduled to land (splash? splush?) into Titan on Jan 14.
The most shocking thing I read from the article was this line:
We can only expect two hours worth of data from the Huygens probe? Why? I find it bizarre that we traveled seven years to get there to get two hours worth of data!
(Yes, I understand that Huygens is only a small part of the Cassinni mission and that we will be getting data back from Cassinni for years.)
Actually I thought it was more like 3 hours with 2.5 hours of descent and 30 min after landing/splashdown, with considerable uncertainty. But not much different, eh?
Well, so, it’s difficult. How do you build an exploring robot if you don’t even know if the surface is solid or liquid or slush? And it’s awful damn hard to get a pound of explorer to that location.
But it’s great to be able to profile various things through the atmosphere and get images from so close by. And like you observe, this is only one part of the overall Cassini program.
More like KAPOW! Good thing we’re mostly going there for the sake of panspermia.
Seriously, though, since we don’t know how the probe will be received on the surface, we can only count on Huygens’s “float” time. If the chutes work, we’ll probably get a minimum of 2 hours of data.
Now inactive and drifting silently through space, once Huygens detects the nitrogen-rich fringes of Titan’s atmosphere, the probe will wake up and if all goes well, parachute to the surface for about 153 minutes. The mother ship Cassini is tasked to have a three-hour listening “window” for this mission, which includes 30 minutes’ surface time, presuming the probe survives. After that, Cassini’s antenna gets pointed back to Earth to relay the data to breathless nerds such as yours truly.
Two hours of data from Titan would still be incredible. I believe that the Titanian environment is going to be quite inhospitable to the craft and rapid deterioration of the transmitter is expected. I’m continually amazed by the quality of the photos, the accuracy of the navigation, and the performance of the spacecraft. This site is one of my daily visits. Well done JPL!
