Cassini Probe Does Titan Flyby

EccentricAnomaly writes "Today, Cassini had its first close encounter with Titan around 8:30AM PDT. Data from the flyby will start coming down around 6:30PM PDT, and you can watch the pictures live on NASA TV. If you want higher resolution or just to stare at one picture for a while, the raw images will be put on the web right away, with pretty press images to follow the next day. And if you want to know about the observations planned for the flyby, you can read this PDF or watch this animation."

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[jnik]

It seems scientists are pretty confident that they can unload much data during Cassini's 9 hours downlink session.

Imagine if there were some downtimes when earth communication cannot be established for a couple of days...

What would more storage buy you? It wouldn't increase the downlink bandwidth, and there's only so much time available to transfer it down, so you'd just get further and further behind. Losing downlink time means losing data, period.

Telemetry bandwidth is always an issue; instruments always produce data at a rate greater than can be sent to the ground.

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[Rei]

Not *always*. When Cassini isn't doing an encounter, it's sitting around doing pretty much nothing (regular bits of telemetry data, random readings, occasional snaps of Saturn or distant shots of moons, etc). Greater storage space, even if not accompanied by an increased bandwidth improvement, allow you to gather more data from your insturments during flybys, which you can transmit during the less-important inter-flyby periods.

Re:4Gbit Solid State Recorders

[Tablizer]

Yeah, the next probes sent to space really should use microdrives for backup at least. I mean, put an IPod on a probe and not only will the probe be able to store tens of GBs of data, but it could even play MP3s on a simulated speaker through the entire mission. Besides, if a probe finds a representative of an intelligent race out there, it could use its IPod to swap music.

This is why NASA does not hire 14-year-olds.