"Only two more weeks, Jack, and we can finally leave
and join the others. Please, don't take any chances..."
Posted on 01/13/2017 9:56:00 AM PST by BenLurkin
JPL has released a re-mix of the data and images gathered by Huygens 12 years ago in a beautiful new video. This is the last opportunity to celebrate the success of Huygens before Cassini ends its mission in September of 2017.
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After a two-and-a-half-hour descent, the metallic, saucer-shaped spacecraft came to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, in temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing.
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How much of this video is actual images and data vs computer graphics?
Of course, the clips at the beginning and end of the video are obviously animations of the probe and orbiter. However, the slow descending 1st-person point-of-view video is made using actual images from Huygens. But Huygens did not take a continuous movie sequence, so a lot of work was done by the team that operated Huygens’ optical imager, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR), to enhance, colorize, and re-project the images into a variety of formats.
The view of the cobblestones and the parachute shadow near the end of the video is also created from real landing data, but was made in a different way from the rest of the descent video, because Huygens’ cameras did not actually image the parachute shadow. However, the upward looking infrared spectrometer took a measurement of the sky every couple of seconds, recording a darkening and then brightening to the unobstructed sky. The DISR team calculated from this the accurate speed and direction of the parachute, and of its shadow to create a very realistic video based on the data.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Titan Touchdown
https://youtu.be/msiLWxDayuA
Titan has interested me for the past 10 years or so.
Titan has seas of Methane and Ethane (I guess now restricted to the poles). Methane is CH4 and created on Earth in the mantle. Natural Gas is 95.2% methane and 2% ethane. So, Natural Gas (a fossil fuel) is found on Titan? But there, they call it a hyrdrocarbon.
That’s got to stink.
Too bad, the headline sounded like a travel agent pitch.
Definitely non-smoking tours only.
Hydrocarbons are called hydrocarbons no matter where they're found ...
[ Definitely non-smoking tours only. ]
Well assuming you want to breathe oxygen, it would be non-smoking...
It you lit a match on titan outside your space suit it would just fizzle out.
The depth of field in the video looks hinky to me: why does that look like model work, rather than real photography?
Does this make us all Huygenauts?
Titan is the only world other than Earth to have standing bodies of liquid.
Yup, seas of natural gas at the polar regions.
And of course seasonal rainstorms of natural gas.
What you did there. I see it.
Wide angle lens. Probably a fisheye.
In its natural state methane is odorless. The rotten egg smell in natural gas is an additive that gas companies put in it so that leaks will get noticed.
Technically, it's "fossil" because you have to dig it up.
Animal fossils are called that for the same reason: they are dug out of holes in the ground, as in the Latin fossa, "ditch".
Methane on Titan is on top of the ground, no need to dig. But the shipping charges for bringing it home are killer.
Thanks for the nice post!
If it’s liquid why do we call it, “natural gas” and what makes it natural?
First, this does nothing to make muslims feel good about themselves.
Second, If the project manager is wearing a garish shirt with a sexy girl on it the whole program is a waste.
Third, Can Sheila Jackson Lee see the flag the moon men planted on Mars?
Well, hmmm. Maybe the asteroid that wiped out our dinosaurs bounced off of Titan and wiped out its dinosaurs, too... ;-)
Fantastic! Thanks for the share.
I don’t think so: even fisheye lenses keep edge-to-edge sharpness - the image is distorted but all of the field is in focus. The video in this clip has a very narrow depth of field which is a lot like the photography you’d get in a small-scale model and a fairly high f-setting.
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