https://youtu.be/TMxL3ZhO8A8

This video combines images from various sources to mimic zooming in on Titan from thousands of km away down to pebble size.

Nice, but I still think it’s a shame that the lander wasn’t equipped to take a 360° high resolution panorama.

Bubblecar said:

Nice, but I still think it’s a shame that the lander wasn’t equipped to take a 360° high resolution panorama.

Good point, but Huygens was relatively small, and was designed to survive a landing on both solid and liquid surfaces. I would have liked it to contain a seismometer.

mollwollfumble said:

Bubblecar said:

Nice, but I still think it’s a shame that the lander wasn’t equipped to take a 360° high resolution panorama.

Good point, but Huygens was relatively small, and was designed to survive a landing on both solid and liquid surfaces. I would have liked it to contain a seismometer.

Got to keep in mind: the survival time on the surface was low. It was battery operated. A longer lasting craft would require its own nuclear power plant, which basically means everything gets scaled up and would need to be a major mission in its own right, not just a little hitchhiker on a major mission.

The other thing is the transmission rate had to be pretty low because of the conditions, and also there could be no long storage and playback: the only data that could be got from it had to be sent during the 90 minutes on the surface before the battery died. (Compare this with New Horizons which will be playing back stored images and data for another year…)

The total bytecount, then, was low and they had to work within that.

No doubt Titan will get its own full scale mission one day but this was like a bonus: something strapped to a full mission and enough to give some interesting and intriguing results.

You can’t make me.

God already did that.