16-January-2005, 05:56 AM
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 504
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jerry
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Space.com
"It was impossible to transmit the entire soundtrack," said HASI principal investigator Marcello Fulchigoni, adding that the sounds he released today were reconstructed from snippets by researchers. "But we have the principal fragments of these sounds."...Tomasko added that 350 images during descent and continuing after Huygens' landing were received on the one working communications channel -- half the crop that would have been harvested had both lines been functioning.
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OK, How do you only get half the data, and all of the principle components? I can understand half resolution, but an intermittant sequence that captures all the key elements, including the ending?
...Or did Huygens fall twice as fast as expected, and return half as many images because the mission had to be terminated early? The science teams could not image the scenario I have painted, so now I have to speculate again: Huygens fell fast, reaching the surface in half the expected time, but at ~200 meters, Huygens knew she was in trouble and completed the termination sequence early. Since everything was retransmitted, and they did not believe the radar - thought it was garbled, the ground troops think that they don't have a real time line...But they did recognize the sounds of the mission touch down sequence, and declared victory, simply guessing at the termination time. Possible? It is a dam good thing we have the Earth based Doppler data to help sort this all out! |
Ummm... no. Not even close. If you had done any actual research on the probe, you would have found out that one of the two communications channels had failed due to a programming error. As such, ESA had only received half of the total amount of data they were expecting. They received all the important bits because most of the data was set to be broadcast on both channels. That has absolutely nothing to do with the probe's rate of descent.
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