Hello,

does anybody know why there has been just a few published (captured?) photos by the Huygens probe after its landing on Titan? As far as I know the probe worked well all the time it was in contact with Cassini - at least an hour or more (probably even afterwards). The first photos of the surroundings appeared soon but afterwards nothing followed - except some further photos from the descending. At the end we saw I think less then a dozen photos after landing. Did the probe stopped photographing or what happened? There ware no ESA reporst of any failures - except of halved transmission capacity. Even in this case there should be much more photos than what we saw.

Thanks for the answer - and sorry for not a perfect English.
Slobodan

Hi Slobodan, welcome to the UT forum.

The probe had only a short amount of battery life, and stopped sending images less than two hours after landing. It should also be noted that it's radio transmitter was only strong enough to communicate with the Cassini probe while it was very close to Titan, so about the time the batteries ran out, it was also getting too far to send signals.

This was all described on the Huygens website long before the landing.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Thanks for your answer "antoniseb",

I am not well informed and may be wasting others time, but still: you also say that the probe stopped sending images less than two hours after landing. I think that was quite more than predicted months before. Wasn't this enough time to take and send more than a few photos that we saw? After all ESA at the time said (if I remember correctly) that even with the halved capacity which had occured there should have been some 350 photos taken altogether - during descending and after landing - when they work out the data. Didn't they also say after the first pictures, taken immediately after the landing, that there are more to come since the probe was working very well? But there were none (except from descending). So I still wonder where are all these pictures - sorry ;-) I missed any consequent explanation about this ...