Huygens has landed on Titan

Holy snot. The first spacecraft to land on a celestial body other than the moon or mars. The Huygens probe landed on Titan today and spewed data for about 5 hours before the battery gave out.
ESA's Huygnes mission page.
Amazing.
One of the descent images shows a network of channels and rivers emptying into a body of liquid. The sensors on Huygens deduced wind speed, atmospheric pressure and the conductivity of Titan's air during its descent. Methane clouds and hydrocarbon rain were also analyzed by an onboard gas chromatograph. A microphone listened for thunder.

Most of the websites have been hammered today. Space.com and spaceflightnow.com are hosting severely reduced page sets because their servers are being pummelled into submission by websurfers. The NASA and ESA sites are dead slow too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The non-separation of the LDS church and Utah state.

Look - I understand that mormons think gays are somehow evil, subhumans. I understand that the LDS won't tolerate gays, doesn't like them and thus won't marry them. But for local government to overturn a supreme court ruling about gay marriage is taking it too far. This is religious persecution on a par with the dark ages. The church doesn't like gays, so it leans on its members in government to do everything possible to prevent them from having the basic rights afforded other couples who want to marry. In other words, the LDS church is forcing it's (wrong) opinion about the LGBT community on everyone, via state and local laws that it has had passed and enforced on its behalf. Why should non-religious people be forced to abide by the opinion of a religious cult that they have no affiliation with? Apart from anything else, the uber-conservatives in this state are always the first ones to bitch when something even slightly unconstitutional happens, yet here they are r
Read more

Employees don't want much

I'm sitting looking at my company's internal 'learning' system this morning - hundreds of online courses that are available to all employees, some of which we're mandated to take. I'm not sure why the rest of them exist. We certainly don't have time to do any of the courses, and for the average employee, they hold no relevance to what we do, or want to do in our day-to-day jobs. I for one just want to be assigned tasks, and then be left alone. I don't need to do hazardous material training - my job doesn't involve hazardous materials. I don't need micromanagement. I don't need all the various efficiency and ethics courses that are available because I have common sense. I don't need to be instructed how to use the email system, nor how 'just in time' manufacturing is good for the company (it has no bearing on our division). Ok I understand all of this is corporate C-Y-A but so many of these things are just inconsequential to us. On
Read more