Was Huygen a success?

[wavelandscott]

So, was Huygen a success?

What do you think?

[wavelandscott]

In all truthfulness, I was a bit disappointed!

After the Mars explorers and their on-going work, a few hours and a few pictures seems a bit small...

[wavelandscott]

But what about seeing what earth may have looked like in the past?

Don't you think that was worth the effort to see that?

What about when our sun becomes a red giant and warms the place up...

Do you think life will evolve there?

[[1ponders]]

Does anyone have a link to any new photos or are the three or four that were release all that is available at the moment

[ving]

astronomically and engineering(ly) the whole thing was fan-bloody-tastic.

to have sent up cassini 7 years ago to do laps around saturn millions of kilometers away, and then to release at excatly the right time and right position the probe to plunge into one the moons (seven years after launch). i am suprised anything worked at all!
the batteries in the probe could have died.
if the probe had been released at the wrong time it may not have bee able to beam images back to cassini.

they have enuff info from the probe to keep them going for a decade.

it was sheer brilliance.

[gaa_ian]

Here here ..quite agree
Some good links for Huygens below
http://anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe

They certainly have the ...right stuff !:cool:

[iceman]

I reckon it was great, very exciting stuff. Like Ving, the engineering and the maths and physics that went into something like that is extraordinary.

Some of the pictures have been great, though I wish there were more.. i'm sure more detailed stuff will come out once they've had a chance to process them.. maybe they need registax :lol:

Shame it didn't have wheels and start roving around like on Mars :D and shame it only lasted 3 hours..

I read somewhere that they would've had twice as many pictures, but due to some human error they only got half the amount expected.. some bug in the code maybe? I bet he gets fired :P

[ving]

they got hundreds of shots ice. we have only seen the "interesting" released ones :)

[wavelandscott]

It was a grand technical feat no doubt...

However, after the Mars landers I am a bit underwhelmed by it.

I am sure that lots of good science will come of it but...it has not fired my imagination like many of the previous exploration activities...

[gaa_ian]

I find myself very inspired by the mission:atom:
But then again I am a bit of a science nut:einstein:
I have published a new "Blog"
after watching the live broadcast from ESA of the science findings from the analisis of the mission over the last week.
The mission scientists are already talking about a "rover" style mission.
See my Blog at:http://ntstargazer.blogspot.com/:rover1: