Re: Titan pictures unimpressive

From: Carsten A. Arnholm (arnholm_at_offline.no)
Date: 01/19/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:06:49 +0100

Chris L Peterson wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:30:45 -0600, "Edward Nash"
> <enash67@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> OK...not to rain on anybody's parade and trying not to be to
>> cynical....but is that all they got was three pictures and a sound
>> bite?
>
> There are hundreds of pictures on the ESA website. There is also a
> wealth of other data that will trickle out in papers over the next
> year.

But it amounts to no more than 474 megabits of data alltogether (according
to ESA). 474 megabits is 59.25 MB, or ~9% of a standard CD-ROM. This
includes the 350 pictures (I think we have already seen them all already,
they are heavily compressed, many of the same scene or showing nothing
recognisable) and a sound recording, and also data from other experiments
such as atmospheric sample measurements.

The Cassini/Huygens mission is a big success (both in engineering and
science), no doubt about it. But I don't think it is realistic to expect any
new pictures, different from what has already been shown. I do hope the
other science data is sufficiently detailed to give us a better mental
'picture' of what Titan is really like. That way we may be able to interpret
the real pictures better. 

-- 
Carsten A. Arnholm
http://arnholm.org/
N59.776 E10.457

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