describe the Titan audio files please

I lack a sound card on my computer (yes, I'm kicking myself now for not
having one!). Could someone kindly try to describe the sounds that the
sensor picked up on Titan. My understanding is that there are two files:
one as the probe was decending and another from the surface.

Thanks in advance,
Gary

The descent audio is wind blowing across a mic while the probe is
rotating and also you can clearly hear what might be mechanical
operations of the probe.

The radar audio sounds like a old atari game sounds with bleeps and
chirps. Then the sounds starts a steady low steady tone that increase
in frequency as the probe gets closer to the surface. Soon as the probe
hits the ground the audio stops.

Neither audio file is informative to us on the outside. Those in ESA
and NASA probably can pull a alot of data from these audio files.

Gary Seven wrote:

I lack a sound card on my computer (yes, I'm kicking myself
now for not having one!). Could someone kindly try to
describe the sounds that the sensor picked up on Titan.
My understanding is that there are two files: one as the
probe was decending and another from the surface.

Actually, there's one from the descent and one that is a radar signal
transformed into sound.

* The one from the descent sounds like heavy noise, I suppose you
could call it wind or perhaps more like the sound of heavy surf. The
soundfile is cut up, with every few seconds a drop or rise in volume.
Other than that, the sound is fairly consistent. What's cool though is
that you can hear a kind of ping from the probe, every second or so
(I'm guessing that it is the sound of the sonar). The soundfile ends
abruptly, no climax.

* The second one, from the radar sounds very electronic. What is cool
is that you can hear a 'heartbeat', two ticks every second. Probably
also a pulse. After a few seconds there are some electronic bleeps
(like the ones you can expect from very cheap Basic computer games).
Then heartbeat again. And then you get bleeps again, turning into a
drone like that of a starting engine. The frequency goes up and up as
the probe gets closer to the surface.

I understand there was a sound file from after the landing too,
sounding like white noise, but I can't find it at ESA's site or on any
of the unofficial coverage sites. I suppose it will turn up again later.


Hope that helps :-)

Steven

well you aint missed much unless you like sonar music from old
submarine movies. That ends at the landing. The descent sound is
like R2D2 cleaning his teeth? Not much there. The ground sound
is a little interesting to me because its nothing but fairly strong white
noise with a little variation thrown in (which Im curious about). Ihave
no idea what the rate of recording was for the ground noise but if its
real time then either there is a lot of steady interference and just
white noise (static) or there is a very strong steady wind sound with
some variation? When you slow the ground sound down a bit it does
sound more like wind blowing - hard? This is all speculation on my
part but sound processing might yield something far more
meaningful and Im sure they will do this in time.

~pko



Gary Seven wrote:

I lack a sound card on my computer (yes, I'm kicking myself now for not
having one!). Could someone kindly try to describe the sounds that the
sensor picked up on Titan. My understanding is that there are two files:
one as the probe was decending and another from the surface.

Thanks in advance,
Gary