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Originally Posted by Jerry
Measuring, yes, but here is the problem: Huygens was caught with her pants down:
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No Jerry, you're the only one showing cheek.
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If The probe hit the surface while it thought it was still descending, and It didn't know it, Huygens would have blithly completed some kind of automated sequence (a lot of what was planned was based upon the assumption the sun sensor would work right).
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Huygens knew when it was getting close to the surface based on return data from the acoustic sounder and the radar altimeter. It knew it hit the surface from the penetrometer data. To my knowledge the sun sensor didn't have any input into scheduling events after landing.
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Huygens would not have even been polling the ground sensing accelerometers until the time-at-altitude table determined it was time to land. On the first polling, the accelerators would have returned the correct message - we have landed, but no time stamp - the time stamp would be the time of first polling, more than an hour after landfall.
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Evidence? You wouldn't design a system to to assign a timestamp to an event at some pre-determined time. You'd record the timestamp when the event occurred! That way, regardless of delays in scheduling or buffering, the data would have the correct timestamp. You're relying quite a bit on the TAT. Too bad it doesn't really help you case.