ESA is finally putting out more Titan data: stitched descent panoramas and color photos, and sounds from the Huygens microphone. The people at Planetary.org people have more detailed Huygens sound data, with processed WAVs and sound spectograms. The sound files are historic; this is the first actual sound we’re getting from an alien atmosphere. Hissy.
Aristocratic Astronomy
ESA Spins Titan Landing Show Into Sludge. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one annoyed at how ESA is dragging its feet on revealing Huygens landing images to the public. When the Mars rovers landed, I was all over their raw image galleries, obsessively poring over every hazcam and navcam and pancam image in sheer amazement. When the Huygens data was received, ESA announced they had 350 photos, showed just one, then promptly switched over to long, fawning speeches by various European politicians. A couple more photos were put out, followed by a notice that no more would be shown tonight, press conference tomorrow, that’s it. What was up with that?
(Fortunately, the DISR data page briefly carried all the raw images from the lander’s DISR package, which I was able to mirror before the 404s attacked. So did Lyle.org. Ha.)
Update: Hey, ESA wised up and published the raw images. Yay!
First Titan Surface Photos
The photos are coming in from Huygens. These first two were taken during descent, from an altitude of about 16km. Isn’t the second one freaky?
And here’s the first shot from the surface itself:
Check out the Planetary Society’s Huygens Blog for scientific commentary on these images, and a story on Huygens’ first pictures from Spaceflight Now.
Update: More science on those photos. Apparently the rocks are blocks of very frozen water ice.
Huygens Lands on Titan
The Huygens lander has safely touched down on the surface of Titan. Nothing else has been received as of yet other than carrier signals, but data relayed through Cassini will begin arriving in about two hours. If all went well, they should be getting pictures, spectral data on the chemical composition of the air and surface, and maybe even sound from the alien environment of the Fuzzy Moon. SpaceflightNow has a comprehensive pre-landing article.
For those of you not of an astronomical bent, Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and the second largest moon in the Solar System. It is unique as the only moon with its own significant atmosphere: a cold, dense fog of nitrogen, methane, and other organic compounds. I call Titan the “Fuzzy Moon” because photos of the moon taken by various space probes in visible light always come out vague and fuzzy, owing to the thick, diffuse atmosphere. Photos taken by Cassini on other wavelengths show a relatively flat, mottled, nonreflective surface, indicating some kind of dynamic action at work. While some scientists theorize that Titan may harbor oceans — or at least puddles — of liquid hydrocarbons, I’m more with the theory that the flat, nonreflective surface could be an oily hydrocarbon slush. We’ll soon know!
There’s an enthusiastic Metafilter thread going on the topic.
Update, 1245 (EST): The probe is well, the downlink established, the data being transferred, but it’ll be a few more hours before we get to see any pictures from Titan. The guys at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who made the DISR Package which took the photos, say they’ll immediately post the first raw image data received to this page. Don’t all go there and start refreshing your browsers all at once.
Air Florida Flight 90
“Larry, we’re going down, Larry,” “I know it.” This day in 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 took off from DC National Airport, in heavy snow, with insufficiently de-iced wings. A minute after takeoff, the plane crashed into the packed 14th Street Bridge, crushing several cars before falling into the Potomac River and sinking into the icy water.
- Washington Post news story, 14 Jan 1982.
- Cockpit voice recorder transcript of the flight’s last minutes.
- Coast Guard Reserve rescue workers remember the scene.
- “Twice Rescued” — flight stewardess Kelly Moore (nee Duncan), a crash survivor, recounts the impact of the event on her faith.
- Other transit woes that plagued Washington, DC that day.
- Two years later, the inevitable movie: "Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac."
- The 14th Street Bridge Complex, into which the plane crashed. The Rochambeau Memorial Bridge was afterward renamed the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge, in honor of one passenger who, five times, passed a rope lowered by rescuers to the other survivors clinging to the wreckage. When the rope was lowered a sixth time for him, he had succumbed to the cold and sunk into the water.
PBS on Street Sense
I’m told that I came out briefly on PBS: Brief one sentence quote here. This was from an on-the-street interview with someone from Jim Lehrer’s Newshour during the Help the Homeless Walkathon.
(What I did not mention in the TV interview was that I ended up voting for Kerry despite the Street Sense “presidential platforms on homelessness” comparison page, which — inadvertently? — came out in favor of Bush’s more clearly expounded stand on addressing homelessness issues. Heh heh.)
Space Roundup: Fuzzy Moon, Anniroversaries, and Comets
For an astronomy enthusiast, I’ve certainly been lax in keeping track of all the excitement going on in the Solar System the past couple of months. Here’s a quick roundup:
- The Saturn probe Cassini has been performing wonderfully since it arrived last year. On Christmas Day, Huygens was successfully released toward Titan for a landing on Jan 14. (That’s tomorrow as of this writing.) Also check out this lovely photo of a shepherd moon gravitationally attracting material from Saturn’s rings, and a haunting closeup of “Half-and-Half” Iapetus.
- On Jan 3, the Mars Rover Spirit celebrated one earth-year on Mars. Spirit is now up atop the Columbia Hills in Gusev Crater, exploring the sloped terrain for odd stones and exposed bedrock.
- The Mars Rover Opportunity, still a good two weeks from its own one-year anniversary, has left Endurance Crater and is now closely studying the wreckage of its own crashed heatshield from descent.
- Comet Machholz is just barely visible to the naked eye near Orion and the Pleiades: familiar stellar territory to any amateur skywatcher. Machholz himself describes his discovery of the comet.
- And just yesterday, Deep Impact was successfully launched. This Fourth of July it will arrive at comet Tempel 1 and fire an impact projectile at its nucleus, creating a crater and dust cloud which will allow the probe and earth-bound scientists to study the comet’s composition.
More coverage tomorrow: Huygens will finally land on Titan, the Fuzzy Moon.
Sweeeet.
I tried the new “Chantico” at Starbucks yesterday. It comes in a tiny, textured 6 oz cup, but there’s enough thick, gooey, concentrated, chocolatey goodness in there for a Venti (or at least a Grande). Exceedingly delicious, but I think I’ve topped up my chocolate quota for the rest of the week. More on the Chantico from Starbucks Gossip. DO NOT GUZZLE OR CHUG THE CHANTICO. You will regret it.
Afternoon with Antifaust
Doc Mic at Antifaust was thankfully able to get a break just after Christmas while I was visiting last week, and he has photos from our day out at Greenhills and Makati. Fantasy, sci-fi, and comic book collectibles, Powerbooks, and gadgets: yes, we’re geeks.
(Note Mic’s layout. I made it for him, with a new 3-column CSS template I’m working on. More on that soon.)
Tsunami Woowoos
Conspiracy theorists out in force: So it didn’t take long for the nutjobs to come out of the woodwork after the tsunami hit. (I’m especially partial to that specific news story because the guy debunking the woowoos is a Filipino scientist from PHIVOLCS.) Best crackpot sightings yet are from Portland Indymedia: “Was the tsunami caused by a bomb?” and NAZI BUSH REGIME’s ENVIRO/HAARP-REICHSTAG FIRE: seize Aceh oil militarily as ‘rescue.'”
(HAARP is an especially fun culprit for the woowoos, since the auroral research program’s methodology of beaming HF radio waves into the ionosphere — scientists, correct me if I’m wrong on that — fits in so well with their conspiracy theories of an Evil Overlord’s Super Death Ray.)