Huygens took around 700 pictures on its way down through Titan in 2005, and we have half of them, because a single command was missing from Cassini's instructions — one of the two radio channels was never switched on, and roughly 350 images were lost

Huygens took around 700 pictures on its way down through Titan in 2005, and we have half of them, because a single command was missing from Cassini's instructions — one of the two radio channels was never switched on, and roughly 350 images were lost

Most ways a space mission can fail are dramatic. A rocket explodes. A lander tips over. A heat shield fails and the whole thing burns up on the way down. Those failures are loud, and you can point at them. The quieter kind is harder to shake: everything works, the hardware performs, the science happens, and then a piece of it is simply gone because one line of instruction was never written. No wreckage. Just a gap where data should be. 350. That…