Chuck Hards chuckhards at yahoo.com wrote:

I've read variously that the Huygens probe was designed to send data from the surface of Titan for only one to three minutes. Can this be true?

Patrick, can you shed some light on this?

I'd think that at least an hour would be required to make sure good data is recovered.

As Ken stated in his reply "officially" there will not be much time for science on the surface. However, unofficially I'm hearing folks on the project feel they'll probably get more than a few minutes. Of course, there for a while it looked like we might not get anything. Seems someone forgot that two separating spacecraft will encounter old Mr. Doppler's shift and so did not allow for that in the transmitter or receiver. Happily they seem to have come up with a work around. Let's hope they got it right. And let's also hope that when the orbiter's mission comes to an end and Cassini takes a one way trip into Saturn, all of that nasty nuclear material it's carrying doesn't cause Saturn to go critical and explode.... (hey, that's what folks were telling Art Bell would happen when Galileo hit Jupiter.) :-) Patrick