Looking at the pictures available from Titan here and here (TIFF files) I see some kind of boundary about 1/3 way down the image (about where it says “240cm” in the second link). The rocks & surface detail appear clearer beyond that point in the picture.
It looks to me like Huygens landed in a “puddle” and the boundary is the edge of some liquid, but none of the reports have said anything about it. So, am I imagining it? What is the boundary? Trick of the light? Wishful thinking?
And, tangentially, is there a better place for the latest news than space.com or the ESA site?
That would be the $64 question. The accelerometer suggests the area has the consistency of wet clay/compressed snow, maybe with a crust. (no cite-- this is via an email from a collegue, though he said he mentioned it on BBC so it’s fair game). That would suggest it’s not a puddle.
The ESA site claims the landing was in a dark area. I don’t know how close to the “shore” this would be-- maybe the area is dark because the dark stuff isn’t liquid. Or maybe it’s just coated with a thin layer of dark liquid.
The whole thing is just freaking remarkable. I think the pictures that came down have basically cinched a more involved Titan probe as a high priority for a future planetary mission.
“Crème brulée” is the analogy I keep reading about; something hard and crusty for a few cm on the surface, then something semi-solid underneath. Even at these temps, a relatively pure lake of methane/ethane would have very low viscosity, so I wonder if this is kind of like a big mud flat with the surface “dry”, but the stuff underneath still sopping with whatever liquid component gives it some maleability. I keep hearing this stuff referred to as “sludge” or “slush”. Maybe its a mixture of hydrocarbons of various size, some of them pretty solid at these temps, some still liquid and volitile, such that a mixture winds up being like a thick tar.
Begging your forgiveness, with advanced thanks for your indulgence, Loopydude will now do the Special-Loopydude-Got-An-Astronomical-Analogy-Right dance.
No, now the case has just cracked open. NASA has to explain how they completely screwed up the tracking, didn’t recognize Earth’s surface, and why the gravity seemed right for Titan, even though it was Earth. Complicating all of this is since it landed in New Jersey, it has likely been taken to a chop shop and dismantled. The parts will probably be sold on the black market to underground rocket builders, engineers, and scientists. If you look on Ebay now, it might have entries for spectrometers, heat shields, and used parachutes.
I still want to know how DARK it is on Titan. I did ask in GQ but it sank without trace. Titan is a long way from the sun, right? If you or I were to land there (with our winter woollies on, of course), would we be able to see where we were going?
Well Saturn is almost 10 times as far from the Sun as Earth, meaning it receives just a bit over 1% as much light. I don’t know what to compare that to, but if you visit one of the Saturnian satellites, I’d recommend bringing a flashlight.
OK… it says on this page that the full moon is only [sup]1[/sup]/[sub]465,000[/sub] as bright as the sun, and it’s no problem to see on a clear moonlit night. So I guess it’s not as dark as all that on Titan.
Wow. I knew the eyes perceived brightness on a power scale, but I didn’t think it was that drastic of one. I was thinking 1% light would be about like full moonlight. It sounds like it would be more like dawn or dusk.
It was rather more than an hour. See the timeline:
As for the reasoning, I have bolded the relevant part. Cassini, which acted as a relay station sending Hugens’s data back to Earth, soon passed beyond the landing site and no longer had a line of sight to the probe. So any data still being transmitted from the surface after that time would not be picked up, and extra battery power would therefore be wasted.
:smack: I knew that. It just sounds like something NASA would screw up. That’s how I messed up. Besides, NASA was in on monitoring it, weren’t they? So, wouldn’t they know it?
