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Titan (Saturn's Largest Moon)

Huygens moon probe lands on Titan
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter in Darmstadt, Germany



Titan: An atmosphere not unlike Earth's billions of years ago


Enlarge Image

The Huygens space probe has touched down on the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan, and is sending back signals, say space agency scientists.
The spacecraft probe had been transmitting data for over two hours as it plunged towards the moon's surface.

This data has not arrived on Earth yet, but the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, US, detected its carrier signal - a sign the probe was working.

It is the furthest from Earth a spacecraft has ever been landed.

The probe's scientific investigation of this mysterious world could yield clues to how life first arose on Earth.

Scientists were excited when the probe first relayed a signal to say it had negotiated Titan's atmosphere, and announced that the mission was a "success".

"I want to make sure that we don't miss the significance of seeing that signal," said Alphonso Diaz, associate administrator for science at the US space agency (Nasa).


See how the Huygens probe descended to Titan
But Professor David Southwood, director of science for the European Space Agency (Esa), said the scientists could not celebrate fully just yet.

"We need to wait for the data to come from Cassini, but we have enormous faith in this mission," he said.

Huygens will transmit the data to its mothership Cassini, which is orbiting in space, for onward transmission to Earth.

The orbiter will then turn towards our planet and send the first packets of information.

These will be received by the European space operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, at around 1615 GMT.

The signal from Huygens was first received by Green Bank between 1020 and 1025 GMT on Friday.

It told them that the pilot parachute had pulled off the probe's rear cover, allowing its antenna to start transmitting.

Unknown surface

Huygens had been coasting silently towards the exotic world for 20 days since being released from its mothership Cassini.

"We're doing something today which will last for centuries. It's not my name that matters it's what we're doing," said Professor Southwood.

"I'm afraid if Columbus hadn't decided to cross the Atlantic ocean, and he'd said it's going to be a two-month trip, Queen Isabella would have saved a lot of money," he added.

"You have to take risks, otherwise, nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Titan is veiled by a thick orange haze which obscures its surface features. Huygens could land with a thud on ice and rock, squelch into tar-like gunge, or splash down in an oily sea.

HUYGENS' INSTRUMENTS

1. HASI - measures physical and electrical properties of Titan's atmosphere
2. GCMS - identifies and measures chemical species abundant in moon's 'air'
3. ACP - draws in and analyses atmospheric aerosol particles
4. DISR - images descent and investigates light levels
5. DWE - studies direction and strength of Titan's winds
6. SSP - determines physical properties of moon's surface


Hopes ride on Huygens
Huygens probe 'looks good'
Cassini's goodbye Huygens snap
The spacecraft will have taken about 750 images during its two-and-a-half-hour descent, shedding light on this cosmic enigma.

"This should provide a spectacular new view of Titan and hopefully a much greater understanding of this mysterious world," said Marty Tomasko, principal investigator on the Descent Imager/Spactral Radiometer instrument on Huygens.

Professor John Zarnecki, principal investigator on the surface science package on Huygens, has made no secret of his wish to land on an extraterrestrial ocean.

"I'm pleased that my instrument has got something to measure a liquid surface, a solid surface and something in between," he told the BBC News website.

"Despite the flybys of Titan by Cassini we still don't know [what its surface is like]."

Data gathered by the spacecraft should give detailed information on the moon's weather and chemistry.

The sounds of Titan's stormy atmosphere will be recorded with an onboard microphone, and scientists hope that they will even hear lightning strikes.

When the European-built probe entered Titan's atmosphere at an altitude of 1,270km (789 miles) from the surface, it was travelling at over Mach 20 which is 20 times the speed of sound.

Once friction slowed the probe's descent to about Mach 1.5, it deployed the first of three parachutes, pulling off the rear cover that protects Huygens from the fierce heat as it enters Titan's atmosphere.

Dominated by nitrogen, methane and other organic (carbon-based) molecules, conditions on Titan are believed to resemble those on Earth 4.6 billion years ago.

As such, it may tell scientists more about the kind of chemical reactions that set the scene for the emergence of life on Earth.

Huygens has spent the past seven years tethered to the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in July 2004.

Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4175099.stm


16:15! Only a few more minutes!

I fear I may wet myself with excitement.

Oops :oops:
 
Cheers for that.My fecking PC has been lying to me for nearly 2 hours making out theres nothing to report!!! Im sure the refreash button is actually supposed to do something!!!
 
ESA have a placholder stating that the first dat ahas been received from Cassini and has been passed to ESOC for analysis.

And apparently the JPL servers have crashed due to excess traffic...
 
My Father has been following it on the news (not that he knows anything about astronomy `its third star on the right, and straight on till morning, dad`) and he said that the mission has been a success in spite of Prof Pillinger being involved....

Very charitable of you, dad...
 
is that it? Boulders?

It looks so ordinary, somehow.

I suppose that is what alien worlds are supposed to be like.
 
At last his PC starts working!! Horah.

There is a program on at 11:30pm on BBC2 with a run down of events so far.This is sooo cool!

8)
 
Homo Aves said:
is that it? Boulders?

It looks so ordinary, somehow.
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No, No, No, No, No!

This is wonderful! I feel so happee! :D

We spend so much time on the FTMB discussing wars, disasters, and the darker side of the human psyche, that it is pure joy to see such a complicated enterprise succeed. Nobody killed or hurt, it's just a triumph for human ingenuity and curiosity.

As somebody said, "Isn't it nice when things just... work"! ;)
 
Absolutely, we're seeing history unfolding, fantastic, and european to boot.
 
Pete Younger said:
Absolutely, we're seeing history unfolding, fantastic, and european to boot.
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Damn right!!! Sorry ive had a couple of drinks! :oops:
 
But it still looks like rocks. It could be they hit Mars by mistake, or perhaps, erm, Brighton Beach:D

The descent photos should be pretty good once they've been cleaned up, that does look nicely weird and alien.
 
They're not rocks! They are little Titanian creatures that were stunned when a bloody great lump of metal landed beside them.
 
Homo Aves said:
is that it? Boulders?

It looks so ordinary, somehow.

I suppose that is what alien worlds are supposed to be like.
Click to expand...

Didn't you learn from Doctor Who that all alien worlds look like disused quarries?

Amazing achievement, I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the images. Now we need to find out if there's anything living in the liquids...
 
This is brilliant. The perspective shots of the landscape with rivers (of something) look amazing. As for the rocks, compare with FT192, page 13!
 
Imagine you are standing on that orange surface, surrounded by that thick, cold atmosphere. The wind might be sluggish, but it packs a powerful punch because of the density; you weigh about a tenth of your normal weight so you could easily get bowled over.
Worse is the windchill factor; all the other cold moons of our solar system have thin atmospheres so you are effectively insulated from the cold by a near vacuum; not on Titan. Titan is probably the coldest place in the solar system for someone trying to keep warm in a space suit...
 
Titan Probe Drops Into 'Creme Brulee'-Like Surface

Sat Jan 15, 2005 08:30 AM ET




By Kevin Krolicki

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Data sent back by the Huygens space probe from the Saturnian moon Titan show a frozen, orange world shrouded in a methane-rich haze with dark ice rocks dotting a riverbed-like surface the consistency of wet sand, scientists said on Saturday.

The Huygens probe, part of a $3 billion joint mission involving NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, made its pioneering descent to Titan on Friday, sending back readings on the moon's atmosphere, composition and landscape.

Slowed by parachutes, Huygens took more than two hours to float to the icy surface, where it defied expectations of a quick death and continued to transmit for at least two hours.

Along with scientific instruments that measure the components of Titan's atmosphere, Huygens carried a sound recorder and lamp to look for signs of surface liquid.

One reading from an instrument protruding from the front of the saucer-shaped craft to gauge how deeply it penetrated upon impact suggested that the moon's surface was the consistency of wet sand or clay.

"We think this is a material which may have a thin crust, followed by a region of relatively uniform consistency," John Zarnecki, the scientist in charge of experiments on Titan's surface said at a televised news conference from the control center in Germany.

Zarnecki said one of his colleagues had suggested another analogy: creme brulee. "But I don't suppose that will be appearing in any of our papers," he said.

Titan, believed to be the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere, is larger than the planet Mercury. Scientists believe a study of the icy moon could yield clues about how life developed on Earth.

METHANE MYSTERY

One of the mysteries of Titan is the amount of methane that surrounds it, prompting speculation that there might be oceans of the element on its surface or below.

Some have also questioned whether the impact of a meteorite -- or some other event -- could have thrown off enough heat to liquefy water on Titan, where the surface is now an extreme cold measured at minus 292 F.

---------------
A panoramic picture sent back from Huygens shows what appears to be a coastal area with banks of fog-like clouds just above and a root-like system of rivulets just inland.

"It's almost impossible to resist the speculation that this is a drainage channel, that we're seeing a shoreline," said Martin Tomasko, a University of Arizona professor and the key researcher on images of the moon.

"You have the feeling that maybe this was wet not too far ago," he said.

Other rock-sized objects photographed in an apparent flow channel on the gold-orange surface of Titan measured appear to frozen blocks of water ice, Tomasko said, although he cautioned more study was needed.

"We just don't have the answers to many of the questions you can think to ask," he said. "Given a little bit of time we will mine (the data) for a new understanding of this mysterious world that has been veiled from our view for so long."

The mass spectrometer onboard Huygens, a complex instrument designed to analyze molecules in the atmosphere of Titan and on its surface, picked up evidence of a thick cloud of methane about 11-12 miles above the surface.

Once on the surface, a heated tube from the craft showed surface material evaporating and producing more methane.

European Space Agency officials said they would investigate why a second, back-up radio channel failed to transmit some data back from the Huygens probe.

The loss of that signal made it impossible to get immediate results from an experiment that had been intended to track wind direction and strength in Titan's atmosphere, scientists said.

But using data from radio telescopes in Australia, China, Japan, the United States and Europe, Huygens scientists said they expected to be able to piece together similar information over time.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to study Saturn's rings and moons was launched in 1997 and is named after two 17th-century European astronomers: Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings and Titan, and Jean-Dominique Cassini, who discovered the planet's other four major moons.

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© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
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Source
 
Last Update: Saturday, January 15, 2005. 10:32am (AEDT)


Saturn moon probe reveals possible shoreline

The first pictures from the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan taken by the European space probe Huygens shows a possibly rocky surface with "drainage channels" for liquids.

Taken from a height of about 16 kilometres, as Huygens descended before landing on the surface, showed what scientists said appeared to be a shoreline.

They speculated the channels might feed into canyons on the surface.

"I think none of us would have expected ... this kind of unveiling, but it is pretty consistent with the surprises we've seen before," said Al Diaz, NASA's associate administrator for science.

The $A3.9 billion Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint project of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to study Saturn, its rings, moons and magnetosphere.

In December, the Saturn explorer Cassini dropped off Huygens for a three-week journey toward Titan, culminating in the probe's parachute-slowed plunge to the moon's surface.

The photos were beamed to the European Space Agency's headquarters in Germany.

Officials there said it appeared that Huygens landed on some sort of solid surface rather than in liquid.

They did not offer any speculation on where the "drainage channels" in the photo might lead or how they were formed.

Titan is believed to have liquid methane and ethane on its surface, but the moon's heavy fog blanket made it unclear what Huygens would encounter when it reached its landing site.

Early success

Scientists said there had been problems retrieving data from one wind experiment but held out hopes they could get the information from a different study.

"We can say this afternoon we have ... a scientific success," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director-general of the European Space Agency, in a press conference from its operations centre in Germany.

Cassini, which acted as the relay station for Huygens, sent back signals showing it had finished retrieving and had turned toward Earth to begin transmission of a likely three hours of data.

Given the sensitive nature of the mission, the Saturn orbiter Cassini recorded the data from Huygens on four systems.

The 320-kilogram probe made its two-hour descent through Titan's atmosphere to the surface after a seven-year journey piggybacked on Cassini and a final one-way trip of about three weeks on its own.

Scientists expect to spend years poring over the results.

"It's got to be unravelled, got to be put together and then scientists being scientists are going to argue about what it means as we piece together our place in the universe and how we came to be," said David Southwood, ESA's director of scientific programs.

Moon with atmosphere

Scientists believe the organic chemical reactions taking place on Titan resemble the processes that gave rise to life on Earth four billion years ago.

Its atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, but its surface temperatures of about -180 degrees Celsius make it inhospitable to life.

The saucer-shaped probe was designed to rotate on its way down, taking high-definition, panoramic images of Titan's thick, smoggy atmosphere and its landscape.

Along with its six scientific instruments that measure the components of Titan's atmosphere, Huygens carries a sound recorder and a lamp to look for signs of surface liquid.

Titan, believed to be the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere, is larger than Mercury and Pluto.

Huygens is the most distant controlled descent and landing ever attempted in the solar system.

Some science team members monitoring the flight have waited decades to see the first of 750 planned images and other scientific readings from the yellow-skied moon.

Huygens was named for the Dutch scientist who discovered Titan in 1655.

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- Reuters
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Well I'll eat my hat, it worked!!!! (Or is it all done in a studio :D )
 
Interesting question

Professor John Zarnecki, principal investigator on Huygens' surface science package (SSP) said the area where Huygens landed appeared to have a thin crust that overlies a material with more uniform consistency something like wet sand.
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They certainly look like they have been eroded by fluidic movement.
 
They look like beach cobbles!

This means there is a BEACH somewhere.

<Homo Aves rushes out for her surfboard...>
 
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