Titan photo quality ?

Why are the photos that return from titan not perfect, dont get me wrong its
a bloody amazing achievment to land a probe there, but surely thats the
difficult bit, if a picture is received from a quality camera which I assume
it is, surely the picture should be perfect, or is the data fragmented.

Steve J schrieb:
Why are the photos that return from titan not perfect, dont get me wrong its
a bloody amazing achievment to land a probe there, but surely thats the
difficult bit, if a picture is received from a quality camera which I assume
it is, surely the picture should be perfect, or is the data fragmented.


Ever tried to surf the internet when all you have is a few kilo*bits*
per second and you've only one hour to download everything you want to know?

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:37:55 +0000, Steve J wrote:

Why are the photos that return from titan not perfect, dont get me wrong its
a bloody amazing achievment to land a probe there, but surely thats the
difficult bit, if a picture is received from a quality camera which I assume
it is, surely the picture should be perfect, or is the data fragmented.

Because Huygens was an add-on to Cassini, and landing was an afterthought
to an atmosphereic probe, and surving landing was chancy at best so they
didn't waste a lot of time or resources on what basically the bottom of
the science-return food chain

Huygens purpose was gathering atmosphereic data. Everything else was
a (very nice!) bonus.

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"

In article ,
Harald Kucharek wrote:
Steve J schrieb:
Why are the photos that return from titan not perfect, dont get me wrong its
a bloody amazing achievment to land a probe there, but surely thats the
difficult bit, if a picture is received from a quality camera which I assume
it is, surely the picture should be perfect, or is the data fragmented.

Ever tried to surf the internet when all you have is a few kilo*bits*
per second and you've only one hour to download everything you want to know?

In a quick web search, I see one Huygens requirement for 2 channels of
8 kilobits/sec transmission rate to Cassini, but Cassini only
received the one channel. That's 1000 bytes/sec, or around just 3
highly-compressed 20-kbyte triplet images per minute (assuming no other
data transmitted), over the roughly 2-1/2 hours it transmitted.

Higher quality would have forced a much smaller quantity of images.

For MER rover-quality images of 10-15 times the size, Huygens could only
have sent maybe 20 or 30, instead of several hundred.

--
Hud Nordin Silicon Valley

Steve J wrote:

Why are the photos that return from titan not perfect, dont get me
wrong its a bloody amazing achievment to land a probe there, but
surely thats the difficult bit, if a picture is received from a
quality camera which I assume it is, surely the picture should be
perfect, or is the data fragmented.

I think they should have sent better version , after all it took 9
year to travel ,