Saturn Experiment Might Be Salvageable

komissar writes "The Seattle Times has a recent update on possible salvaging of the Atkinson Saturn experiment. With some work, the data may be recoverable."

Re:Great quote...

[QMO]

I couldn't see where it said that it was Atkinson that forgot. It seemed to give the impression that someone else was supposed to have done it, but it didn't really say.

Re:Great quote...

[KinkifyTheNation]

On Thursday, Idaho scientist David Atkinson said that someone failed to turn on a radio receiver for the instrument he needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon.

Nothing new

[Frans Faase]

Sorry, to say, but the article referenced does not give any new information. The data is lost and an attempt is being made to reconstruct the path of the huygens probe using the doppler shift of the signal picked up by several radio telescopes on earth. This require huge computational efforts which can take several months to be completed.

Re:Great quote...

[Unholy_Kingfish]

It was ESA's fault (no one is saying exactly whose fault in ESA). They created the command sequences for the Casssini/Huygens decent. They missed flipping the bit to turning on one of the two receivers. How can you forget something so important? NASA/JPL/ESA did this as a "joint" venture, so ESA had that responsibility for the Cassini programming at that point in the mission.