Freezing Point @ 1 atm. : -296.7°F Boiling Point @ 1 atm. : -258.7°F It's a brisk -266 Kelvin in Spring Texas
I am absolutely shocked by the dreadful quality of the images sent back ~ they were going to be poor to begin with then the geniuses at ESA compounded the problem with this… The communications failure occurred on Cassini, not Huygens, and was caused by an error "as simple as throwing a switch to, 'On.' We did not set the Cassini software to 'On' and it's our fault," said Jacques Louet, head of science projects at ESA. "Space does not forgive stupid mistakes, and we made a stupid mistake. I take full responsibility." *----><----*
There were many problems obviously with imaging Titan ~ extremely low light, thick atmosphere, fast/ bumpy decent, etc. The Huygens probe was relatively cheap in comparison to Cassini so the equipment used was (basically) off the shelf stuff that they knew worked well. The images from Huygens if everything had worked perfectly would have been comparable to something from the 70's. Anyways... to make a long story short they lost a lot of data.
That enhanced image looks like a 19th century daugerrotype. For shame, Cassini software non-switcher-onners, the thing traveled billions of miles with its fly down.
man how did i miss this thread until now? i love solar system stuff. any astronomy stuff really, but especially the solar system. i remember reading so much stuff from voyager 2 back in my elementary school days (early 90's). good to see more probes going out like this to the outer planets. now they just need to send one to europa. as far as screwing up the "on switch" thing, i often wonder how many millions of things must go into something like this that it's just so easy to miss something like this. like that one thing that they lost b/c they didn't convert to metric or something. i mean i'm sure there are a ton of things that seem real simple but in getting a thing like this prepared and ready it just seems inevitable something will get overlooked (although screwing up unit conversions and losing the thing is a little on the extreme stupidity side of things).
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/saturn-tour/where-is-cassini-now/ 12 year necrobump!!! I'm blown away at the speeds that Cassini is moving. 4 months until the Cassini mission is over.
