Contingency plans for unexpected battery life aboard Huygens

Need some clarification on the unexpected battery life aboard Huygens
and what, if any, was the plan in place to deal with it. We heard in
the press conference yesterday that ESA was hustling get as much earth
based RT coverage as they could to pick up signal as Cassini went over
the horizon. Does anybody have a clue about, 1) what data was to be
gained or lost by this manuver? 2) Could on board systems be rigged
to cross talk and send the pictures lost by the drop out of A (?)
channel over to the working other channel

Earth based radio telescopes were able to confirm the presence of the
Huygens radio carrier signal during descent. The signal strength was
much too small for the radio telescope to obtain the telemetry portion of
the signal.

I don't know if the missing pictures could have been sent on Channel B,
but once Cassini went beyond the horizon the data transfer was at an end,
that is, the extra battery life was a non-issue.


Could on board systems be rigged
to cross talk and send the pictures lost
by the drop out of [channel] A (?)

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 01:34:40 -0600, "Revision" k@tdot-com wrote:

I don't know if the missing pictures could have been sent on Channel B,

On the TV, they said that they had a choice of what to do with the two
channels - redundancy or twice as many photos (and some other data).
They elected to try twice as many photos. That failed, but if they
had chosen redundancy, we wouldn't have gotten the rest of the photos
that way either.

---
Replace you know what by j to email

In message , Jud McCranie
writes
On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 01:34:40 -0600, "Revision" k@tdot-com wrote:

I don't know if the missing pictures could have been sent on Channel B,

On the TV, they said that they had a choice of what to do with the two
channels - redundancy or twice as many photos (and some other data).
They elected to try twice as many photos. That failed, but if they
had chosen redundancy, we wouldn't have gotten the rest of the photos
that way either.

And if their luck had been really bad we'd have the same problem with
both channels.