Wow What a Week!

It began with a building excitement among our space enthusiast community, centered upon the Internet Relay Chat channel #space on irc.freenode.net. About 40 of the regulars were hanging out on the channel preparing to watch the NASA TV coverage of the historic Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint NASA/European Space Agency/Itallian Space Agency mission that would send the Huygens probe to land on the surface of the moon Titan orbiting Saturn.

Titan is of outstanding scientific interest since since it is the one object in the solar system believed to be similar to the early earth in having a thick atmosphere composed of nitrogen, methane, other organics and it also has a lot of frozen water on it surface. As the Huygens probe would parachute down to the surface, it would collect a lot of data on the atmosphere (what compounds are present, pressure, temp, wind speeds etc and it would capture ~750 triplet images (three cameras at different angles/magnifications) with the Descent Imager - Spectral Radiometer designed by researchers at the University of Arizona. From these low resolution images, larger mosaic images can be created that would hopefully give a good look at what the surface of titan would look like. Also the cameras would continue to take pictures once it landed to see what the surface looks like.

As part of our space enthusiasm, we also try to get the public excited about these space science missions and often submit stories on Slashdot, the "News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters" community of millions of geeks. Sure enough, a story about the Huygens mission appeared, and I decided to post a comment to the story inviting people into our channel to discuss the mission in real time as it happened. The comment was rapidly moderated up, and before we knew it, we had 250 people in our channel!

Well, the mission was a spectacular success! The probe landed and transmitted back nearly all of it's science payload. Congrats to the ESA, NASA, ISA, JPL and the University of Arizona!

The first press conference only showed three of the ~350 images that had been returned. Those images showed the view of rocks/ice boulders at the surface and what appeared to be a shoreline with clear evidence of channels that might have been formed by liquid methane flows. It was very exciting, but we wanted more.

A couple hours later, the raw images were posted on the net and everyone in the channel started pouring over them. As several channel regulars, and a few of the visitors, were experienced hobbyists at image processing, people immediately began trying to stitch the images together into mosaics to get a better picture of the surface of titan. Over the next 8 hours or so, members of the channel exchanged their latest creations. Anthony Liekens started collecting the images and posting them to his website so that we would have a communal place to share the images, improve them, and later, share them with others.

Then a new story was submitted to Slashdot announcing the success of the mission, and also linking to Anthony Liekens collection of mosaics built by our community. Sure enough, he was now getting slashdotted. From slashdot lots of others picked up the story including:

SpaceRef and their affiliated sites like SaturnToday.com
SpaceDaily
NasaWatch
UniverseToday
The Planetary Society
A prominent Astronomy site from Checheslovakia
We even made it on a popular Conspiracy Theory Site
Spiegel Online (Babelfish Translated)
Heise Online (Google translated)
Folha Online (brazil)
MSNBC
Nature Magazine
New Scientist
the Discovery Channel

As well as countless other sites (more to come I'm sure). The current list of linking sites can be found in the web server logs from Anthony Liekens Site. Interestingly, the site that drew by far the most traffic to the page, was www.fark.com, a popular community of news and boobie voyeurs. One link there reduced Anthony's web server into a smouldering ruin until the images were transferred onto MIT's network and he set up a static html page. Perhaps the term "slashdotted" (the crushing of webservers by sudden and overwhelming interest) should be changed to "farked" ;-)

We were stunned by the news coverage, especially from the venerable Nature Magazine, arguably the top scientific journal in the world. Indeed Slashdot ran a second story about this too.

Check Anthony's site for the best results from our community and outstanding additions submitted by other amateurs around the world. It should get updated as new images are processed. Also watch our community science & politics forum Foxcheck, Dan Crotty's site, Michael Lyle's site, Rupert Scammel's site, and Kevin Dawsons Site

The great thing about all of this, is that what we achieved as a group was to increase the public interest in this amazing space mission. A cause that is worthy of great attention. We also expanded our little space enthusiast community greatly as many knowledgeable space enthusiasts have now discovered us.

Currently we are waiting with nervous tension for the next press conference tomorrow morning at 4 AM CST (10 AM GMT) to hear more data and interpretation of the mission from the pro's at ESA/NASA/JPL/ISA/U of A. Rumors are floating around that the radio astronomers may have actually managed to capture all the missing data from the mission including another 350 photos or so (just a rumor). If true, I hope they release them immediately ;-) Could be a another long night!