Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

dweav256 · 2005-01-14 19:13:26

Why is it that I feel like I am a red headed step child out of the 50's? I mean, this is the year 2005 and the British Space Agency (or whatever they call themselves) wants to send in some piss poor trickle down photography of the new world (Titan) man had just visited with modern day technology.

I mean, the pictures that they are letting us see are poor quality. My daughter's Wal-Mart disposable camera takes better pictures than the bullcrap photos that we have seen so far.

I do not know about you, but I am tired of this crap.

I want my tax money back!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Sincerely,
Tax Payer

ERRORIST · 2005-01-14 22:12:51

Exactly, I used to get instant polaroid pictures better than that. We waited 20 years for this? Man who do they think they are kidding. The old and decrepid Terraserver gives better resolution than this crud.

Euler · 2005-01-14 22:21:11

That is because they have only released raw pictures so far. After the pictures are processed they will look beter. You also have to consider that there is not much light there to work with.

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-14 22:24:46

I think that you denigrate the achievement it is to get any pictures from Titan at all back to Earth. As Euler mentioned, there is simply not that much light to work with either, and Titan being so cold, infra-red night vision wouldn't do you any good either. There is also the eternal thick mist of hydrocarbons floating in the atmosphere, hanging like a London fog over everything.

Mad Grad Student · 2005-01-14 22:34:35

I think the title of this thread is enough to make it a candidate for locking by itself. We should all be greatful that Huygens lived long enough to send any pictures home. I agree that the ESA has some weird habbits about how it releases its data, but c'mon, can't you be happy about it? We landed on the Moon!

ERRORIST · 2005-01-14 23:00:30

Lets put our Mars rovers up there and blow there minds away. All they needed was an old WW2 strobe light. Lock the thread for what? Freedom of speech? Huygens should be called Hoggins. Since they be hoggin the photos.I agree with him I want my tax money back on this.

LtlPhysics · 2005-01-15 01:26:46

The Martian Rovers wouldn't work on Titan.

These look very salvageable, courtesy of Yang Liwei Rocket, here, on newmars, in another thread.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~rwald/pano5 … odupes.jpg

http://whodatzone.com/forum/index.php?a … ...&id=714

They could be viewed as movies. Maybe talkies when the sound of descent is added.

The smog is not so thick that the surface can't be seen from a fair distance, from 10 to 20 km or thereabouts. I don't know why ESA couldn't snap off a clear picture after the probe landed.

ERRORIST · 2005-01-15 07:40:23

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just send a Kodak camera from Wall Mart. It would be in color and the resolution would be a million times greater.

You know one of those el chepo 5 dollar models

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-15 08:36:36

Spoiled...

Getting "pretty pictures" back from Titan is a little bit harder then Mars...

1: Its dark. All the time. Even during the day. Titan has at best only a few percent of the sunlight as Earth, and even less thanks to the thick atmosphere. Conventional optical cameras, such as the ones on the MER rovers that are so pretty, simply would not work at all.

2: Getting data back to Earth is a function of the available power supply. More power, more data, nicer pictures... the trouble is, that the probe had to remain light weight, so there was only limited allowance for batteries. You can't use solar pannels since there is no sunlight, and an RTG would be fairly heavy too per-watt (not to mention expensive), which leaves you batteries. Which is just as well, given that Titan and Cassini would only be in position to communicate for a short time anyway.

Then there is the fact that the camera wasn't the most important instrument either, the gas analyzer and such take up energy and uplink bandwidth too. The camera is more of a peripheral addon really. The probe was only intended to last an hour or two, pretty pictures were not that high of a priority.

Oh, and don't forget that it is cryogenically cold on Titan, which will inhibit batteries and shorten their life severely without a heater, which would itself run the batteries down quickly. Miniature nuclear heat sources would be useless given the thickness of Titan's atmosphere, which would freeze the probe all too quickly anyway.

3: Size. The probe had pretty stringent volume and dimension limitations in order to fit in the Titan-IV along with the hulking Cassini. Obviously not enough space for a big directional dish antenna to increase signal quality/speed and landing parachutes. Not to mention the difficulty of targeting Cassini with it.

There are many reasons that the photographs were few and black & white, but your denigrating whining can only be caused by being ungreatful and willfully ignorant of the challenges of the mission.

Yang Liwei Rocket · 2005-01-15 09:17:02

The pictures so far have been wonderful

What is true is that if one thing annoys me its the European ESA release policy on the images of Mars Express and pics from Smart1 craft

but other than that the ESA missions have been great and it has been a great partner in joint missions with NASA, such as the Hubble, Soho and the future JWST

NASA sometimes bends over backwards to public pressure and trys to keep happy from Crackpots in the USA. The European Space poeple have a have a different data release policy than NASA and they seem to be cautious not to let scientific teams other than the principal investigating teams of each experiment to have access to the data, before the first publications are done...
Incidentally, the reason the ESA doesn't immediately release raw data is that it undercuts the scientists who have worked so hard to make the project successful. By all rights, they should have the first look at the data and the chance to make some important discoveries. How would you feel if you had invested 10 years of your life on a project, and when the first data from that project finally came back there was something of obvious, earth shattering importance in frame 107, but while you were still looking at frame 10 some joe, shmoe on the internet had already scanned through and found 107. You had done all the work, but you'd get none of the credit. That would suck.
I think that the reason NASA releases raw data immediately on receiving it is that they (NASA) are overly sensitive to the idiots who scream, "WHAT ARE THEY HIDING FROM US???11??? NASA NOES THE TRUTH!!!!111oneone!!!!"
Aliens , Martains, Area 51, Face on Mars....and 10% of the US public thinks NASA never went to the Moon ? Maybe they watch too much Xfiles ??
It should be wrong to try and please these crackpots

plus the space industry has done much to advance sience, in data on health, satellite mapping, telecommunications and broadcasting, aerospace designs, military benefits, weather prediction....

Listen to GCNRevenger, LtlPhysics, Euler & Mad Grad Student on the facts of such a mission
Plus getting pics wasn't the only part of the mission
there was the Surface Science Package consisting of nine independent sensor subsystems

the HASI (Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument),

(HASI) comprises sensors for measuring the physical and electrical properties of the atmosphere and an on-board microphone that will send back sounds from Titan.

the ACP (Aerosol Collector and Pyrolyser) ,

will collect aerosols that will be analysed by the Gas Chromatograph and Mass Spectrometer experiment. It is equipped with a deployable sampling device that will be operated twice during the descent. The first sample will be taken from the top of the atmosphere down to an altitude of about 40 km. The second sample will be collected in the cloud layer, between altitudes of about 23 km and 17 km. After extension of the sampling device, a pump draws the atmosphere and its aerosols through a filter in order to capture the aerosols. At the end of each collection period, the filter is retracted into a pyrolysis furnace where the material from the captured aerosols is analysed

the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph and Mass Spectrometer).

Gas Chromatograph and Mass Spectrometer is a versatile gas chemical analyser designed to identify and quantify various atmospheric constituents. It is also equipped with gas samplers which will be filled at high altitude for analysis later in the descent when more time is available.....

and a whole lot of other instruments

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-15 09:54:41

The ACP device imparticularly must have been a major electricity hog thanks to its furnace, and I'm sure that the GCMS couldn't be that light weight either given its complexity.

Pictures are nice and all, but they can't tell you what you are looking at is made of (at least in the optical range) nor anything about the most curious part of Titan, its atmosphere.

If you want to have lots of pretty photos of Titan, you'd make an RTG powerd balloon probe perhaps, with a sample digger and cameras on a cable that doubled as an anchor or somthing. Perhaps a rover with landing pontoons on its lander bus, in case you come down on the Methane sea.

Just getting to Titan would be hard though, and would require some pretty powerful rockets to get signifigant payloads there and would definatly be a multibillion dollar project.

ERRORIST · 2005-01-15 10:41:58

This guy is correct. ESA is holding out on us for some reason. If JPL had run this part of the mission we would have seen the decent video yesterday.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05g … d-05g.html

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-15 10:52:03

And what of it? The principle investigator and his colleauges deserve the first look at the images. Processing them and going over them to see if there are any obvious discoveries takes time. Alot more then a few hours... Hubble pictures are delayed some months (with exception) if I am not mistaken.

It would simply be cheating all their hard work if they just spread them around publicly. Sure I want to see the better pictures, but that wouldn't be fair to fellow scientists to take their data before they had a chance to use it.

You shouldn't question why the ESA is being stingy, but why JPL is so inconsiderate.

ERRORIST · 2005-01-15 11:23:47

The scientists should be able to look at them at the same time the public does since we pay for the mission. It is simply cheating all the publics hard work since they do all the hard work paying for such missions.

"Sure I want to see the better pictures, but that wouldn't be fair to fellow scientists to take their data before they had a chance to use it."

With the invention of the computer we can all see it at the same time. Your statement is just plain stupid and uncalled for.

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-15 11:34:54

On the contrary, these scientists did the work, and they therefore deserve the credit. Thats how today's science works Errorist, you should know what you are talking about before you pass judgement... billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money goes to research funding every year to researchers, a small portion of which goes to fund my work. Yet scientist every day take credit for the work they do, even though it is funded publicly, that is how things are.

Simply because the experiment is bolted to a probe 700M miles away and not a lab bench on Earth makes no difference.

RobS · 2005-01-15 13:24:36

If we've waited seven years for all the data, why not wait a few more days! Let the scientists get the first chance to write up an article for Nature, rather than having to compete with a dozen other scientists who didn't do all the work to develop, build, and maintain the camera system.

I am amazed that we have 350 pictures. Forty years ago Mariner 4 flew past Mars to take the first pictures, and if I remember right, it send back only 23 pictures! And they were fuzzy, grainy things. . . in the days before computer enhancement! Its amazing to think that in forty years we coulod build something to do about fifty times as much tent times farther away!

-- RobS

DonPanic · 2005-01-15 13:51:50

LO
Well don't cry, you will have some more ESA Huygens photos on these http://www.futura-sciences.com/communiq … .php]pages,
don't forget that the launch started 7 years ago, the program started 15 years ago, so the optronics aren't todays ones

What amazes me the most are the photos showing something that looks like rivers making a delta system throwing into a lake.
What can flows that way by -180° C ?

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-15 14:56:37

Liquid methane can

Other scientists will get their hands on the pictures... in due time.

Grypd · 2005-01-15 15:38:30

Another point was that the Huygens probe would have only 3 hours to collect all the data it could before it was severed from its ability to send anything back. After that Cassini would never get in contact again as it was over the horizon.

So should the scientists have designed a probe that sent a lot of information back or pictures and take it from me at the bottom of the titan well the signal from Huygens was about as powerful as a commen mobile phone. The scientists and the officials chose to get as much info of the makeup and what makes titan tick. Pictures which would take a lot of the carrier band where simply not a priority. They got enough to find out what they need to know the rest of the information is the basic information which will keep the scientists busy for years.

Huygens is not a publicity exercise but it really is one useful science probe. ESA will for those who need to know will be releasing a lot of information about SMART1 in february when it has started its science run across the Moon.

BWhite · 2005-01-15 22:04:47

Here is an idea for future Titan cameras, quoted from the space.com message board:

The cameras the TV networks use in race cars have a clear, rotating disc and wiper arrangement in front of the optics. Cheap solution to a problem as these race cars seem to be constantly spewing all kinds of nasty chemicals on the electronics, probably not too unlike Titan's atmosphere. Also, suspect most of aerosolized goo in Titan's atmosphere, would not collect on a surface that was even slightly warm. This technique was (I think) employed on the Pioneer Venus multiprobes to keep sulfur/sulfuric acid off of diamond windows for IR scanner.

dweav256 · 2005-01-15 23:18:26

GCN Revenger,

I disagree. The tax payers are footing the bill, the scientists work for the American people, and in this case the British/Germans too.

Are you a liberal?

Geeesh.

Belinda · 2005-01-16 03:25:18

dweav256 writes: "...this is the year 2005 and the British Space Agency (or whatever they call themselves) wants to send in some piss poor trickle down photography of the new world (Titan) man had just visited with modern day technology.

"I mean, the pictures that they are letting us see are poor quality. My daughter's Wal-Mart disposable camera takes better pictures than the bullcrap photos that we have seen so far."

- Would a colour camera have been necessary? Wont it be possible eventually to extrapolate good images from the b/w ones plus other measurements taken by Huygens instruments?

dweav256 writes: "...The tax payers are footing the bill, the scientists work for the American people, and in this case the British/Germans too.

"Are you a liberal?"

- This is as though there is some sort of competition between US and European scientists as opposed to them working in collaboration as is clearly the case. I though this was supposed to be an international site. 'Liberal' or 'conservative' in the US political sense are parochial and incomprehensible to most people outside your backyard. No-one will ever go to Mars while even Mars Society/ forum people fail to think of ourselves as common inhabitants of a whole planet.

B

ERRORIST · 2005-01-16 08:20:15

"On the contrary, these scientists did the work, and they therefore deserve the credit. Thats how today's science works Errorist, you should know what you are talking about before you pass judgement... billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money goes to research funding every year to researchers, a small portion of which goes to fund my work. Yet scientist every day take credit for the work they do, even though it is funded publicly, that is how things are.

Simply because the experiment is bolted to a probe 700M miles away and not a lab bench on Earth makes no difference."

So you think you guys own the dang thing. That is plain idiotic. You own part of it because some of your taxes fund it.We the taxpayers pay you to build it. If not you would be unemployed and would be living under a bridge somewhere.
Yes you deserve credit for a job well done as all employees do. But, in this case it is a job poorly done. IE: missing half the pictures,information being held back from taxpayers,poor quality pictures (a Wall Mart camera could do a better job) & pictures not being released to the public in a timely manner as JPL does. JPL knows the tax payer deserves better. I say we should do it alone. We don't need politics to be involved with this.

GCNRevenger · 2005-01-16 09:00:58

GCN Revenger,
I disagree. The tax payers are footing the bill, the scientists work for the American people, and in this case the British/Germans too.
Are you a liberal?
Geeesh.

You make it sound as if you are not aware that the photos WILL be made public. They will be. Distributed for free most likly to researchers or even the general public in one form or another... just not yet.

If every scientist was forced to publicly publish all their data that they have worked so hard for before having a chance to analyze it, the entire mechanism of the modern scientific community would falter. Why? Because other people would take the data that you worked so hard for and analyze it themselves and make the discoveries themselves and not the researcher who did all the work.

So, what you will be left with is a small cabal of data theives who happen to be a little faster and not troubled with doing any of the work themselves who make all the discoveries and new knowledge... so what will there be left for the guy who did the work? His name will just be on the byline someplace and forgotten because someone else took his work. There will also be a side-effect that most researchers will be dumbed down and fewer real scientists would be produced if all you did was experiments for other people.

For example, most PhD programs bascially require that you make new knowledge or a discovery in order to be awarded a doctorate. Canidates are required to spend substantial time performing a literature search to make sure that nobody else is doing anything similar.

HOWEVER, if he overlooks a journal or somthing and someone else does a similar work and publishes it first, guess what happens? ...All the work that the other guy did, the years of labor and work to get his degree... were for nothing.

For regular professional researchers it is almost as bad, where the notarity of your work is your resume to large extent, how much and the quality of material you published for instance, and if someone else, who isn't botherd by the need to build and operate the space camera at mission control, gets the pictures first and writes an article first... then writing a journal article that says the same thing is meaningless.

You are aproaching the issue purely from the money prospective, but money is not the only currency in the scientific community, and the government has no right to take this other "currency" simply because the government pays their monetary cost. If there were a real, material benefit of the discovery then sure, the government or whoever paid for it owns it more-or-less, but getting your name into a major journal is not somthing you can put a monetary price on nor expect.

And for the reccord, I am quite the conservative politically, and I am aspiring to be a professional scientist.

dweav256 · 2005-01-16 09:59:30

"And for the reccord, I am quite the conservative politically, and I am aspiring to be a professional scientist."

GCNRevenger,
Good for you.

Since you want to be a scientist, let me ask you a simple question. Which is older, the Sun or the Earth?

thanks,
Taxpayer

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#1 2005-01-14 19:13:26

Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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Re: Piss Poor Hygens Camrea Shots - I am tired of the BS!

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#21 2005-01-15 23:18:26

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