The guys at Arizona have released raw images from the descent camera from the descent of the Huygens probe, they also have a description of the experiment.
Anthony Liekens (an enthusiastic amateur) has been up all night creating and collecting a wonderful series of mosaics of Titan from the images, including the following colour corrected panorama from Christian Waldvogel.
This is only 1/2 size of the original – please Read More for the full scale version.
The Planetary Society weblog from Darmstadt has now wound down, but before they finished they reported on the last formal press conference about Huygens which contained lots of good details such as “they collected 3 hours and 37 minutes of data, of which 1 hour and 10 minutes was on the surface“, how far the “penetrometer” went into Titan’s surface and that there will be an official inquiry into why the A channel data was lost.
Wow!
They’re all appearing now at the this page including the first colour image, mirrored below:
Credits: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona
The Planetary Society has the first of the sounds from the Huygens probe’s microphone on its descent through Titans atmosphere, including one segment that might be from after landing.
The Planetary Society’s Science & Technology coordinator is at Darmstadt in Germany and is keeping a blog on Huygens of all that’s happening, from the look of it before it appears on the ESA’s site. 🙂
In the last few seconds ESA has released a more detailed image of the surface of Titan showing large boulders on the surface. It is, as I write, uncalibrated, so the size of them are unknown.
Credits: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona
The Hugens probe that piggy-backed to Saturn on the Cassini spacecraft has successfully landed on Titan and initial data indicates it has landed safely on a hard surface as opposed to making a splashdown. This ESA probe continued to send data for as least as long as Cassini was above the horizon.
NASA (who built the Cassini spacecraft) have put up a press release with the first raw image from the descent of Hugyens, though the image archive itself will be appearing here at the ESA’a website. However, connections to it are timing out at present.
Update: ESA now has that image too.
Here is that first Hugens image.
Credit: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona
The Swift Gamma Ray Burst space telescope was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral today.
I know a number of the folks at the AUS-VO workshop were looking forward to this.
The idea is that when this new detector spots a Gamma Ray Burst it immediately turns to it and images it at various wavelengths. I also believe that it will transmit a finding chart to the teams so that terrestrial telescopes (such as the ROTSE robotic scopes can provide follow up observations.
I’ve spent the last two days at the 2004 Workshop for the Australian Virtual Observatory representing VPAC along with my friend & colleague Damon Smith. We were there representing the APAC Compute Grid project and Damon presented on the Certificate Authority that VPAC is running as part of this effort.
However, given that I did my degree in “Physics with Planetary and Space Physics” it was really nice to get to merge two great interests of mine, big computers and astronomy. 🙂
It was really interesting, although at times as virtually everyone there was working in astronomy at postgraduate or postdoc level it was a bit over my head. Some of the really interesting things to come out of it were:
But the scariest fact of the day must go to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which apparently will be capable of generating 8 PetaBytes of data each year once it goes live!
Update: Been outside whilst it’s clear, but can’t see anything. There’s some high cloud so that may not help, but looking at the auroral oval maps below it looks like reporters may have been a little over-optimistic on this unless you’re in Tasmania.. Hey ho, another time..
Apparently there is the possibility of Aurora tonight, courtesy of a large solar storm going on at the moment.
Details in these links: