First Images from Titan

space.com ^ | January 14, 2005 | Huygens

[Phsstpok]

Could getting signals back and forth to the spacecraft have been enhanced by the shadow earth casts on the spacecraft, i.e. blocking the spacecraft from seeing the sun and electrical noise from the sun?

the "shadow" of the Earth would be about the size of a hydrogen atom on Saturn or Titan. And Earth would transit the Sun, not eclipse it, since it is so much smaller. Put a quarter in front of a basketball at 100 yards and you won't notice the quarter at all and the Earth is much smaller, relative to the Sun.

If anything this allignment would be a distinct disadvantage, from that point of view of the spacecraft, which has to "look" into the radio glare from the sun when receiving signals from Earth.

The advantage for communications is that the side of Earth facing the spacecraft is facing away from the Sun, so the Earth bound antennas are in shadow, not Saturn. That would cut out interference at the receiving end, so it might help some.

[robomurph]

Brilliant!

[Diamond]

That looks like a roll of film from one of my family vacations.

Cordially,

[Phsstpok]

I hadn't looked at the site you mentioned and was just going by what you had found.  I hit the NASA site and really wasn't seeing the info I wanted, so I went googling.

I found this site: Solar System Live.

and come up with an Orrery image that shows the direct allignment of Sun-Earth-Saturn.  I would assume that is how they planned it.

I can't post the picture as it expires after a couple of minutes.  Go to the link above and play with it yourself.  it's pretty good.

Years ago I fell in love with a Japanese site called AstroArts.  They had a JAVA based applet that lets you view orbits, including things like comets and asteroids by feeding in the data.  It's one of the best tools I've found for dealing with "it's going to hit the Earth" type news items.  Often you look at an orbit from directly above the plane of the ecliptic and the object does look like it's going to hit Earth.  You then change your point of view to looking along the plane and you find it's WAY above or below Earth at that particular point.  We live in a 3D universe, after all.

The app is available for download and is a freebie.

 

Used to be they had a list of newsworthy comets and asteroids to pick from, with the details all set.  Now it's in a DB and you need to know a name or reference to search for, such as "P/HALLEY" but it's still fun.

[Rockitz]

Talk about delayed gratification- I was working on the Titan IV program in 1997 when Cassini was launched.

[Axenolith]

Code of the Lifemaker

An interesting read in light of the landing. I read it ages ago and liked it a lot. There's a sequel 20 years after the fact I haven't read but I see the reviews aren't as good on it...