[curiousuburb]

"A Fantastic Success... We are the first visitors to the surface of Titan."
- ESA chief at this morning's Huygens (First Science Data Recieved) Briefing

[that we know of]

"Huygens continued to send data, received here on Earth through ground stations, after Cassini had to end scheduled high-data rate reception to turn and relay science to us."

"All spacecraft housekeeping data in the stream looks normal."

I may be misinterpreting this early (more coffee on the way), but I took this to mean that the batteries lasted longer than expected, and effectively that we have more data from Huygens on the surface of Titan than we had bandwidth for.

Cassini was always due to have limited data take due to orbit planning, but the fact that Earth stations picked up the Huygens-to-Cassini carrier signal and our final limitation on new data is/was the shortage of "big ears" more than a billion miles away.

"Last spacecraft Carrier was at 1555GMT from a station in Australia... Radio telescopes around the world are being requested to try and track longer to extend the scientific doppler work and see how long Huygens survives"
- Huygens Principal Investigator Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton

The first "Actual Science Results" briefing won't start for a few hours as they decompress the datastream and collect enough info to feed the world's media.


Landing on other worlds is cool.