My understanding of the ESA press conferences is that half
the imaging data is permanently LOST.
The only thing the radio telescopes will be
recovering is the wind data that was being uplinked on the
UNlistened to channel. The Huygens carrier was extremely stable
and so radio interferometry from multiple dishes will allow
a reconstruction of the flight path and thereby the winds.

It is unfortunate that they didn't uplink all the images
over BOTH channels. If you scan the EAS web site they have
37 pages of raw images with 1000% redundancy. Each image
appears at least 10 times, although this may be more the
result of Cassini resending the data to ensure complete
reception. There may be 300 images, but they're of the
same thing, over and over and over.

Thanks for the great links. The IEEE article was most
interesting. Politics at work, and being too cheap to
do things correctly, as always.... Did they learn NOTHING
from the Mars Polar Orbiter crash, Hubbles bad mirror figure,
etc.?

Robert

Nate Duehr wrote:

> Nate Duehr wrote:
> 
>> Mike Hord wrote:
>>
>>> Right on.  Per NPR, the temperature inside Huygens was "room temp"
>>> even after it touched down.  In fact, Huygens continued operating and
>>> transmitting data FAR longer than expected; so long, in fact, that 
>>> rotation
>>> of Titan carried it out of range of Cassini.  Upsetting, since more data
>>> is always better, but at least we know that we got the maximum bang
>>> for our Euro (since it was an ESA program, after all ;-)).
>>
>>
>>
>> Considering the flight crew "forgot" to turn on the second data 
>> transmitter, exactly half the data possible was lost due to human error.
> 
> 
> Oops, corrections after reading more carefully in my linked articles. 
> One of the receivers on Cassini was off, not the transmitter on Huygen 
> due to miscommunication between NASA and ESA.
> 
> They are now trying to piece together as much of the "lost" data as 
> possible from the many radiotelescopes that were pointed toward Titan as 
> "backup" receivers.
> 
> Sounds like most are hopeful that most of the data was not completely 
> lost.  It'll be interesting to see how much of it they can piece together.
> 
> Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com
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