The thing I find fascinating about space science is the enthusiam for uncertainty in the results.
For example, in a talk by Ralph Lorenz from Johns Hopkins University, about mapping Titan’s mountains and channels using spectrometry results from VIMS, he optimistically announced that a sure sign an instrument is working well is when the first results from it make no sense.
His explanation is that when you haven’t observed the results before, it is because previoiusly unprobed subtleties are now being, err, probed.
He did have some interesting results – showing that Titan has mountainous regions (“Titan is pretty flat – except where it isn’t”) that bump up its average radius to 2575.5 km – 0.5 km bigger than previous data from Voyager suggested.
His IR data was coupled to Radar data, and this is a trend at the meeting, and likely to be the way of future LPSC meetings. Using data from mutliple instruments to cross check, verufy and enhance results.
Leave a Reply