wcomer wrote:BTW, this data ahs the same compressino artifacts. I think it is safe to assume that the compression is the best available to anyone.
"The images are transmitted using a compression scheme which pre-dates JPEG", according to an answer on their Ask an Expert
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/expert.htm page. No details on that compression scheme though. I suppose knowing how it works may help removing some artefacts created by it.
With Huygens rotating as it descends through the atmosphere, no two successive images cover exactly the same area, and thus compression artefacts normally won't blur the same ground feature repeatedly. However, the images taken after landing all have the camera pointing in the same direction, and the compression mosaic grid yields the same set of distortions on every image.
When I first browsed the raw triplet pages, I thought they were only releasing images from the ground, as they appear both in the beginning and the end of the set. However, they seem to be presented in semi-random order, and the images from the descent can be found in the middle of the set. Has anybody seen any metadata associated with the triplets, such as timestamps? Are the three images in each triplet supposed to be taken simultaneously, or did the cameras operate independently of each other?
A number of images are severely scrambled, perhaps due to sampling or transmission errors. I think there are also repetitions, or what do you think of the following two triplets:
The bottom images are from the downward-looking camera, and the features in them seem to be distorted by motion blur, but it looks like the very
same motion blur. The middle-row images also look identical. Yet the top-row images (from the sideways-looking camera) are quite different from each other, and I'm not convinced they even overlap.