DISR Ask an Expert with Mike Bushroe

There is a new page with answers to questions posed to DISR team members on the DISR website. These questions are answered by Mike Bushroe, a Senior Staff Engineer on the DISR team. While many of the questions and answers were related to the remote possibility of life on Titan, some of the Q and A's were actually useful ;) One question in particular was pretty important to myself and to those enthusiasts working on Huygens images in their spare time. The question related to whether the DISR team would be able to subtract out the haze in their images to produce a clear view of the surface. In Mike's response, he mentioned that DISR images are 12-bit lossy compressed images, as opposed to the 8-bit jpegs "raw" images posted on the net thus far. This is similar to the ISS raw images situation. The actual raw data is 12-bit but the images posted on the JPL raw images page is 8-bit (and a jpeg). Another response by Bushroe showed that Huygens did not seem to detect seismic activity (using the accelerometers in the SSP) on the surface of Titan. Anyways, despite all the questions about life, this turned out to be a good Q and A.