>On Jan. 14, 2005, ESA's Huygens probe made its descent to the surface of Saturn's hazy moon, Titan. Carried to Saturn by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, Huygens made the most distant landing ever on another world, and the only landing on a body in the outer solar system. This video uses actual images taken by the probe during its two-and-a-half hour fall under its parachutes.
Huygens was an amazing project. It also sticks in my head as a really instructive example of "bug in production code" - the Huygens probe was transmitting on two channels to the Cassini orbiter during its descent. Due to a mistake in the Cassini software, one of the receivers never got switched on. 900 million miles from Earth and during a one-off unprecedented probe landing on an outer solar system body. Half the images and some wind speed data lost.
I don't know if the exact details of the bug ever got published but it would be interesting to know how it slipped through testing.
Thank you SO much for this! I just watched it and my jaw dropped to the floor. What an accomplishment. I thought about a hundred years or so from now when there will be a base on Titan and explorers on and above the surface will happen on this probe, hopefully right where it landed in 2005. Worth building an exhibit/museum for visitors on the site, it seems to me....
Illustrative video:
>On Jan. 14, 2005, ESA's Huygens probe made its descent to the surface of Saturn's hazy moon, Titan. Carried to Saturn by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, Huygens made the most distant landing ever on another world, and the only landing on a body in the outer solar system. This video uses actual images taken by the probe during its two-and-a-half hour fall under its parachutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA
Huygens was an amazing project. It also sticks in my head as a really instructive example of "bug in production code" - the Huygens probe was transmitting on two channels to the Cassini orbiter during its descent. Due to a mistake in the Cassini software, one of the receivers never got switched on. 900 million miles from Earth and during a one-off unprecedented probe landing on an outer solar system body. Half the images and some wind speed data lost.
I don't know if the exact details of the bug ever got published but it would be interesting to know how it slipped through testing.
JPL tests in production!
Thank you SO much for this! I just watched it and my jaw dropped to the floor. What an accomplishment. I thought about a hundred years or so from now when there will be a base on Titan and explorers on and above the surface will happen on this probe, hopefully right where it landed in 2005. Worth building an exhibit/museum for visitors on the site, it seems to me....