UI scientist’s experiment may not be lost after all

A University of Idaho professor learned Friday that most of the information he thought was lost during a deep-space experiment has been recovered.

David Atkinson said he felt last weekend like he’d been “hit by a truck” when scientists discovered that a mistake had apparently ruined an experiment he designed for the Huygens space probe. Last Friday that saucer-shaped silver probe fell by parachute through the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere.

His experiment would have tracked winds as the Huygens probe descended and sent data by radio signals to an orbiting satellite, called Cassini, several thousand miles away.

Scientists involved in the mission admit that simple human error had created the problem that nearly wrecked the experiment. A team member failed to turn on the command that would tell Cassini to receive the wind-shift information being sent to it from the Huygens probe, said Bob Mitchell, the Cassini project manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

But on Friday, European Space Agency officials reported that 18 Earth-based radio telescopes captured most, if not all, of the signals that Atkinson needed from the probe. Because the Huygens probe still sent the wind-shift data toward Cassini, it was captured by the radio telescopes but from a much greater distance, said Atkinson.

Atkinson had spent 11 years preparing the software and system for the experiment; he had also waited during the seven-year flight while the Cassini-Huygens package sailed toward Saturn.

Now he faces a lengthy new task of rewriting the signal-tracking software so that the data collected on Earth can be revised and replotted.

Atkinson said the software was programmed to track signals that took less than one second to travel from the probe to Cassini. Under this emergency “Plan B” solution, the time lag from the Cassini orbiter to Earth is around 4,000 seconds – roughly one hour and seven minutes – Atkinson said.

“None of those problems appear to be any sort of show-stopper, so I’m anticipating recovering most of our experiment,” he said via an e-mail message. Since mid-January he’s been in Germany working with the science team from the European Space Agency.

“I’m kind of relieved,” he added. “But now I’m kind of nervous again because it’s a whole new ball game.”