Marc 182 wrote:

So long as I'm dreaming here, and discarding everything else I've said,
it would have been nice if they had just programmed the gas
chromatograph to make one more run starting at the end of the nominal
mission, 180 seconds after landing. That hot spacecraft ("hot" being a
very relative term here) was probably boiling all kinds of interesting
stuff off of the surface and a GC is great at unambiguous identification
of organics.
Yes, that'd be great.
Do you think you could tell EAS about this?
http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEMK...ndex_0.html#O9 would be a
start.


But, of course, they never expected it to live for any length of time on
the surface... or did they? I wonder what the thinking was when they
slipped in the big batteries.
There's lots of things you can do with spare power. Maybe boost
something, do more software upgrades, show pictures from the stars if
the mission would have been impossible and huygend had to be jettisoned
into another direction, whatever.
Maybe they would have been able to reprogram the probe and send half
an hour later if they had to change cassinis orbit for some reason.
Remember the approach actually taken wasn't the plan either.

Lots of Greetings!
Volker