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Huygens lands on Titan!

Europe reaches new frontier ? Huygens lands on Titan

14 January 2005
ESA PR 03-2005. Today, after its seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA?s Huygens probe has successfully descended through the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn?s largest moon, and safely landed on its surface.

The first scientific data arrived at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, this afternoon at 17:19 CET. Huygens is mankind?s first successful attempt to land a probe on another a world in the outer Solar System. ?This is a great achievement for Europe and its US partners in this ambitious international endeavour to explore the Saturnian system,? said Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA?s Director General.

Following its release from the Cassini mothership on 25 December, Huygens reached Titan?s outer atmosphere after 20 days and a 4 million km cruise. The probe started its descent through Titan?s hazy cloud layers from an altitude of about 1270 km at 11:13 CET. During the following three minutes Huygens had to decelerate from 18 000 to 1400 km per hour.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Ca...ens/SEMQ1QQ3K3E_0.html

NASA TV Live

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Sir Ulli
 
Supposedly, the pics will appear on this page - eventually.

Mission logs here

Capture from NASA screens: 😉😛
New software version - deleting temp files.
SETI@home client.
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SETI@home was developed by David Gedye (Founder),
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Matt Lebofsky, Peter Leiser, Brad Silen, Woody Sullivan, and Adam Wight.

Sending result - connecting to server.
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SETI@home account summary:
Name: Huygens
Data units completed: 1
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Client exit at user request (-stop_after options)
Click to expand...
Just to sort of keep this on topic. 😛
 
Amazing. So it would appear at first glance that it's not such a slushy place afterall. 😉

I heard from a friend that there might be some tar pits of some kind? :Q

 
Sounds of Titan

15 January 2005
Audio data collected by the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI), which includes an acoustic sensor, during Huygens' descent, 14 January 2005.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM85Q71Y3E_index_0.html

Enthusiast compositions of the Huygens images

Since the images of the Huygens probe -- descending to Titan (moon of Saturn) -- have been published on the net, the people in IRC channel #space on irc.freenode.net started to play with these raw images and made some mosaics of these images.

This page summarizes some of the more interesting results. You can click the thumbnails to see full sized versions.

This work has been done by amateurs with no extensive scientific background, publishing the first images in under 8 hours. We'll have to wait for ESA/NASA to deliver us the correct images, so please, take the resulting images on this page with a grain of salt (that was a disclaimer). We have shown, however, to be able to bring composited images online earlier than ESA/NASA! It was an amazing night, these results have been gathered in about 8 hours time starting with the raw images and having no idea of what to expect, or what goals to reach.

look at this

http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens

Sir Ulli
 
Originally posted by: networkman
Amazing. So it would appear at first glance that it's not such a slushy place afterall. 😉

I heard from a friend that there might be some tar pits of some kind? :Q
Click to expand...

At least where the thing landed it wasn't slushy. Stinks that we've only got one probe - sort of like having a probe land in the Andes mountains after flying over the Amazon rainforests. You land in a frozen place with jagged rocks, but the aerial pictures showed green places with blue rivers.
Those descent images look like rivers leading to a body of liquid. A rover would be awesome, but it'd probably be ridiculously expensive - can't just use solar power on it, and you'd need an orbiter, or else a super-powerful transmitter to get a signal to Earth. That, and it's too cold there, unless we start a whole new research program for low-temp lubricants, and basically low-temp everything.

Be crazy if they did find evidence of some kind of bacteria living there. We've got lifeforms living in super-hot underwater vents here on Earth, and things that live in frozen rocks; maybe something found a way of ekeing out an existance in Titan's oceans.
 
Similar, But Different: Huygens Probe Unlocks Another Planet in Our Solar System

By Cynthia Phillips, Ph.D.

With the successful landing of the European Space Agency?s Huygens probe on Saturn?s moon Titan, we can now bring the number of bodies in the solar system that have been landed on by a spacecraft up to four (or five, if you count the soft-crash-landing of the NEAR spacecraft on the asteroid Eros). The Moon has been the most visited, with robotic landers from the former Soviet Union and from NASA, as well as six successful landings with astronauts in the late 1960?s and 1970?s. The planet Venus was visited by four successful unmanned landers from the former Soviet Union in the 1970?s, and the planet Mars has been visited successfully by a variety of NASA robotic landers starting in the 1970?s with the two Viking landers, 1997?s Mars Pathfinder, and 2004?s Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
...

read the very intreresting Story Similar, But Different: Huygens Probe Unlocks Another Planet in Our Solar System

Sir Ulli
 
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