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:

• NIght Sky Live – a website that links to images from CONCAMs (CONtinuous CAMeras) that are mounted on a number of telescopes worldwide, and a number of them are always in night. There are two in Australia, both at Siding Spring.
• The second of the two scopes at Siding Spring is a robotic telescope known as a ROTSE (actually it is ROTSE IIIa) and is involved in automatic follow-ups of Gamma-Ray burst events.
• SkyMapper (to be built at Siding Spring by ANU) is going to be the replacement for the Great Melbourne Telescope which was destroyed by bushfire in 2003. It will do a full-sky survey of the southern hemisphere (all 20,000 square degrees) and catalogue over 1 billion sources. They estimate they’ll have generated around 90TB of data (65TB images and 25TB calibration) by the time they’ve finished the survey.
• Swinburne are working hard at bringing online about 12TB of historical pulsar data from the southern hemisphere, and their CPSR2 dector generates about 11TB of raw data a day (128MB/s), so they have to process it all (“fold it”) down to about 1.5TB a day to make it manageable.
  

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:

• NOAA Auroral Oval Maps
  
• Space Weather report
  
• SpaceWeather’s Auroral photo gallery for Nov 2004
  
• Google news report on possible aurora over Australia
  
• Google on Aurora in the northern hemisphere

The IEEE Spectrum Magazine is reporting that the Huygens probe would not have returned data to Cassini when released to probe Titans atmosphere.

None of the participants from the manufacturer through ESA to NASA realised this could happen, partly because the Italian manufacturer saw JPL as a rival and wanted NASA to sign an non-disclosure agreement to protect their proprietary design, which NASA refused.

Disaster was averted when Claudio Sollazzo, Huygens’s ground operations manager at the ESA became uneasy about this not being tested, and asked Boris Smeds (also of the ESA) to investigate. He finally persuaded NASA to relent and allow the test and demonstrated that Cassini would not understand the signals that Huygens sent because of the doppler shift as it accelerated away due to Titans gravity.

The ABC is is reporting that a Chinese satellite destroyed a home in Sichuan Province last Friday.

Apparently Chinese space experts said “The landing technology of our country’s satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this,” – so in this case did they have something against the person who owned the house ? Or maybe it was an extreme practical joke ?

I wonder what the insurance company would say..