Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. As JPL's Mitchell explained to Spectrum, "Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."

JPL's Horttor admitted that NASA probably could have insisted on seeing the design if it had agreed to sign standard nondisclosure agreements, but NASA didn't consider the effort worthwhile, automatically assuming Alenia Spazio would compensate for the changing data rate.

Horttor never got an explanation of why Alenia Spazio's telemetry system was built with a timing system that couldn't accommodate the Doppler shift in Huygens's telemetry. "It is a design feature of another application in Earth orbit, and they just reused it," he told Spectrum, adding, "I don't know why anyone would ever want to build it that way." (An Alenia Spazio spokeswoman said that none of the company's officials were available to comment because of a company-wide summer vacation period.)

incredible how several apparently minor human and engineering factors came together to cause it. This guy Smeds really is a hero. I had no idea of any of this before reading your post.

One for the ESA .. and to JPL for rescheduling the Cassini trajectories so cleverly