Questions tagged [huygens-lander]

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31 votes
2 answers
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Huygens Lander: Why The Short Battery Life?

I was reading into the Cassini–Huygens mission and was surprised to learn that the Huygens probe had a battery life of only 3 hours. Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention why this was the case. What ...
BMF's user avatar
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8 votes
0 answers
125 views

How do people know how big the rocks are in the photos of Titan's surface?

How do people know how big the rocks are in the photos of Titan's surface?
space-enthusiast's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
1k views

Why Never-EVER Land?

In this answer @Hobbes points out that data from the Huygens lander is still generating a high flux of new publications in 2018. One of them in the search results linked there is: Never-EVER Land - A ...
uhoh's user avatar
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5 votes
1 answer
203 views

Is data from Huygens still being analyzed in 2018?

The Huygens probe landed on Saturn's moon Titan about 13 years ago and provided unique "first-hand" data about Titan. I was unable to find how many papers have been published based on this data, but ...
Don_S's user avatar
  • 379
4 votes
1 answer
135 views

Was there any downside of the approach trajectory of the Huygen's probe?

I found this image on the Wikipedia page for the Huygens spacecraft: Source Titan orbits saturn at ~5.57 km/s. The probe seemed to reach ~6.5 km/s before hitting Titan. The probe's velocity vector ...
Magic Octopus Urn's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
105 views

Are there both "lake" and "sea" designations on Titan? Officially or otherwise?

@TomSpilker's excellent answer to How (the heck) do they know some lakes on Titan are 100 meters deep? says at the very end: As far as the lakes (smaller than the seas) go, as the sources you cite ...
uhoh's user avatar
  • 149k
3 votes
0 answers
107 views

How did Cassini orbit Saturn with such little power? [closed]

This 6-ton device entered the orbit of Saturn, and even went to the fondant module on Titan. I would like to ponder - how did they do such a thing with their small carriers? Oh yes! Gravitational ...
Alex Maddyson's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
51 views

Organized sources of information collected by Cassini-Huygens?

I'm looking for places or repositories where is the information collected by the Cassini mission including the Huygens probe at Titan, ideally curated or organized in some way.
Valentino Zaffrani's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
81 views

How did omission of command to Huygens lander not get caught by anybody at ESA nor anybody at JPL? Procedures in place to avoid in future?

In this answer to Prior to putting spacecraft on a trajectory going a significant fraction of the speed of light, would some things need to be tested on Earth? I wrote: As far as communications is ...
uhoh's user avatar
  • 149k
1 vote
1 answer
306 views

Did the Huygens lander have a flood-light for photography? Was it used?

According to this cool answer the Huygens lander on Saturn's moon Titan had a flood light to aid in photography of the surface because of the very low ambient light levels due to the 9.5x farther ...
uhoh's user avatar
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