Sounds of Saturn's Moon "Titan"

[toine6]

A few days ago ESA <--(corrected) sent a probe to Titan and used some instrumentation during the probes descent to the moon's surface.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM85Q71Y3E_index_0.html

The first recording is a series of sounds taken from the onboard microphone and sounds like lots of white noise etc.

The second recording sounds like some dude messin' 'round with his synth to me and is actually the more interesting recording.

Pretty facinating stuff anyway.

[.jon]

Thanks for keeping your eyes (and ears) open!

real otherwordly stuff

[toine6]

And otherWorldly too

[.jon]

I'm reallly trying to becom abeter typr!:)

[fitch]

heard this on sky news a couple of days ago.. it blew me away ..




good on them for putting a mic on the probe.. i wonder what make it was LOL

[toine6]

HEHE


I'm sure someone can come up with a more fun answer than me, however I did find some information on a microphone they planned to use on a Mars mission.

Mars Microphone Instrument

http://searcht.netscape.com/ns/boomfram ... iption.pdf

D.W.Curtis U.C.Berkeley Space Sciences Lab 97-5-7

The Mars Microphone (MM) is a small (50 g) instrument to sample sounds on
Mars. It forms a part of the Russian LIDAR instrument, and was developed at the
University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory under funding from the
Planetary Society. It will fly on the NASA Mars 98 lander mission.

Power and telemetry resources are extremely limited, so only a few short sounds
can be sent. During the hours to days it takes to send a sound sample, MM will listen. It
saves the loudest sound it hears during that time to be transmitted next. Sound samples
are heavily compressed using a somewhat noisy compression scheme to maximize the
amount of sound we can return. Flash memory in MM is utilized to store these sounds so
they are not lost when power is cycled on and off each day.

In addition to these short sound samples, a more continuous record of sound levels
will be collected in the form of integrated power in 6 filter bands. These filters are
integrated for a programmable interval from 1 second to 10 minutes (longer integrations
give more continuous time coverage with less telemetry, but with lower time resolution).
Five of the six filters divide the sound spectrum, each filter covering about an octave.
The sixth filter gives the total power in the instrument pass band.

The system has two basic modes: High Frequency (HF) and Low Frequency (LF).
In HF mode, the system samples sounds at 20 kHz, while in LF mode, the sound samples
are taken at 5 kHz. The filter bands also shift so that the top filter goes to the Nyquist
frequency (10 kHz and 2.5 kHz respectively). Sound samples last 2.6 seconds in HF
mode, and 10.6 seconds in LF mode. These modes can be selected by ground command,
in response to what we see in the first few sounds.

The instrument has a 12 bit dynamic range in its Analog to Digital Converter.
This is augmented by a programmable gain stage which can be commanded from the
ground to give 1x, 4x, 16x, or 64x gain boost to the signal. This allows us to respond to a
wide range of possible sound levels on Mars.

The ADC, digital filters, and processing, and LIDAR interface are implemented in
an RSC-164 from Sensory Circuits, which is a general purpose microcontroller designed
to do speech recognition. Three memories are used in conjunction with this controller: an
8 Kbyte PROM to store code and tables, a 512 Kbyte RAM to store data temporarily, and
a 512 Kbyte Flash memory to store information when power is removed. Together with a
small Electret microphone and preamplifier, this is the complete MM system. These
parts are mounted on a 2” square printed circuit board in a 2” by 2” by ½” box.

The MM communicates with the LIDAR over a three wire serial interface. This
interface is used to send time and operating mode information to the MM, and to receive
telemetry packets from MM (on request). MM is powered by a regulated 5 volt service
provided by LIDAR. A complete description of the MM to LIDAR electrical and
mechanical interface can be found in the “Mars Microphone to LIDAR Interface
Specification Document” (David Curtis, U.C.Berkeley).

A PC running software based on LabView was used as a LIDAR simulator in the
instrument development process. The PC can control the instrument, and decompress
and display the data. It can also play the reconstructed sound samples (which have been
converted to ‘.WAV’ files). With some simple modifications and additions this setup can
be used to analyze the data after the instrument has been mated to the spacecraft.
Alternatively, the decompressed data can be passed on to more sophisticated display
programs like IDL for analysis.

Mars Microphone Block Diagram

Preamplifier RSC-164
8K PROM
512K RAM
512K Flash
LIDAR Serial
Interface
Microphone
Gain Control

[Wopelka]

A few days ago Nasa sent a probe to Titan and used some instrumentation during the probes descent to the moon's surface.

Nasa?
i thought it was ESA, you know, Europe

[Breakpete]

Huygens (the probe), was an undertaking of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Credit where credit is due.

It did catch a ride with Cassini of NASA though

edit: Wopelka, you beat me to it

[toine6]

A few days ago Nasa sent a probe to Titan and used some instrumentation during the probes descent to the moon's surface.

Nasa?
i thought it was ESA, you know, Europe

Wow, wasn't even aware of an European space program

Spotted the news off of the Nasa website, and just assumed they were responsible.

Indeed ESA deserves the full credit for their work!