The Cassini Huygens probe is super cool, don’t get me wrong. With my background, I can see the real achievement and spectacular engineering subtlety in not only surveying but landing on a body which is 60 or so light minutes away. Bloody incredible, frankly. As far as I can tell, only the Doppler Wind Radar experiment failed, and that can pretty easily be made up for with some quality terrestrial radio telescope time.

The thing is, the pictures are great and I’m sure there’s lots more to come, but there is a bit of giggle factor with the audio recordings. A probe drifting down through the atmosphere of a distant moon hears… well, a bunch of wafty hiss. What a surprise. Would have been nice if there was a gentle thud at the end, shortly followed by a little grey munchkin saying “Anyone for tennis?” but you can’t have everything, can you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2005 at 10:15 pm and is filed under blimey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.