Huygens Descent Imager

SpaceSciNewsroom · 117K views · 2013 · 4:40

Open on YouTube

Space exploration & spaceflightother

Why Space Exploration Stack Exchange recommends it

Space Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as an example of video-like footage from a probe beyond the Moon, made by stitching individual photos.

Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2018 to 2022.

What it is

A short clip built from images taken by the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer aboard ESA's Huygens probe as it descended onto Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005. It is posted by the SpaceSciNewsroom channel with credit to ESA, NASA and the DISR team.

Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Timeline of Cassini–Huygens.

What people said

Recommends stackzebra · 2018-12 · Space Exploration Stack Exchange · on “Has anything close to video ("live" or otherwise) been shot in space from beyond the Moon?”

It depends on what you consider a "video". Since space probes only take photos, "videos" can be achieved by stitching multiple frames, but then those videos are usually low FPS. Since your title isn't limited to rovers, here are some examples: Descent of Curiosity on Mars: Descent of Huygens on Titan: Jupiter from Voyager (here each frame is one Jupiter day apart, so technically this is also a video?): And here's a video of an actual rover: Spirit being stuck in the sand on Mars: Here's the Curiosity timelapse: Japanese Hayabusa2 collects a sample: So as you can see, they are mostly timelapses, made from individual photos.

Cites Swike · 2019-09 · Space Exploration Stack Exchange · on “Why does this image of Jupiter look so strange?”

As @Hobbes mentioned it is not an image of an entire hemisphere but it has been distorted to allow for wide angle vision. That's why it looks so strange. The image [LINK] is a composite made by Kevin M. Gill [LINK] (a software engineer from NASA's JPL) using the JNCE_2019255_22C00023_V01 [LINK] , JNCE_2019255_22C00024_V01 [LINK] , JNCE_2019255_22C00025_V01 [LINK] , JNCE_2019255_22C00026_V01 [LINK] , JNCE_2019255_22C00027_V01 [LINK] and JNCE_2019255_22C00028_V01 [LINK] JunoCam [LINK] images. The metadata from those 6 images shows that they were taken with exposures of $3.2\; ms$ , with $2\; min$ of separation between shots, for a total of $10\; min$ . Since this was made during the 22nd perij

Cites BrendanLuke15 · 2022-05 · Space Exploration Stack Exchange · on “Could SpaceX's Starship's landing and restart process work on Titan?”

Getting There: In general there is "the quick way" and "the efficient way" to get to the outer planets. The trade-off is between the capability of the launch vehicle and the time-of-flight to reach the destination. For the mid 2020's timeframe I looked for "the quick way" using a Jupiter gravity assist (though Jupiter is not in the ideal phase with Saturn but it still helps): [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (Personal work) Here we see typical C3s of about 120 $km^2/s^2$ , arrival $v_{\infty}$ of about 7 km/s, and time-of-flights of about 6-7 years. For reference here is the relationship of C3 to $\Delta V$ from an assumed 250 km parking orbit with Starship's "empty" [LINK] and "full" [LINK] payload $\D