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Titan (Saturn's Largest Moon)

rynner2

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Many more Solar System moons than thought may have liquid oceans, increasing the chances of life having evolved: BBC Article

And, a discussion of the possibilities of Life on Titan.
The possibility that all of Titan's current atmospheric CH4 and N2 is of biogenic origin is explored from a consideration of the potential productivity of oceanic microbes.
 
According to the blurb at Spaceflight Now:

"Seven years after launch on a four-planet gravitational bank shot covering more than 2 billion miles, NASA's $3.3 billion nuclear-powered Cassini probe - the most sophisticated robotic spacecraft ever built - has finally reached the solar system's most spectacular target: The ringed planet Saturn."

Spaceflight Now

Cassini-Huygens NASA page

Some nice pictures and information from Cassini's flyby of Saturn's moon Phoebe, plus longer range shots of Iapetus.

CICLOPS have some Cassini images of Titan too, if you can stomach the site's Star Trek pretensions.
 
It might look a bit like this; Saturn is disturbingly nonspherical, when you look at it closely.


(Image generated using Celestia space simulator)
 
Its very impressive. I have been following this closley
 
Interesting findings

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/03/MNG177G7U31.DTL
Cassini detects surge of oxygen, circle of 'dirt'
Sensors reveal object may have hit Saturn's icy rings

Pasadena -- New images from Saturn and its dazzling ring system are pouring in from the Cassini spacecraft to scientists here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and puzzling they are indeed.

Observations of the planet by Cassini's ultraviolet imaging instrument show startlingly recent activity: Within the past six months or so, some unknown object may have hit the rings at extremely high speeds and released vast quantities of oxygen from the ice particles. But no one has seen the mysterious object, nor does anyone know what it might have been.

In addition, particles of what appear to be some kind of "dirt" seem to be circling the planet within the largest apparently empty gap between the icy rings, but no one yet knows what that so-called dirt is made of.

And the mysterious moon Titan, which will be explored more fully in January by the European-built Huygens probe now aboard Cassini, has shown a bit more of its unknown surface in fresh, though fuzzy, images. The images indicate that mountain ranges and fractured continents may lie there, the scientists believe.

As Carolyn Porco, who heads the spacecraft's imaging team, told reporters Friday -- speaking for all the bemused scientists seeking to make sense of what they're seeing -- "Life is good right now!"

Cassini slipped into the first of 76 planned orbits around Saturn on Wednesday night.

Donald Shemansky of the University of Southern California, who has used Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph to watch Saturn and its ring system throughout the spacecraft's approach to the planet, reported that his measurements of oxygen surrounding Saturn show a sudden and huge increase in the amount of that element occurring in January.

It flooded the planet's environment, he said, and it appears that the object -- perhaps an asteroid or meteorite flying in from the outer fringes of the solar system -- might have been only 3 to 6 miles in diameter, but that it must have been speeding at nearly 135,000 mph, Shemansky said.

That speed generated so much energy, he calculated, that it must have released more than 300 million pounds of oxygen from the icy particles of Saturn's E ring, one of the seven separate rings that make up the planet's most dazzling feature.

Roger Clark of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver is mapping the planet and its rings at infrared frequencies, and he reported on his team's puzzling observations of the Cassini division, a 3,000-mile-wide gap in the rings.

While the rings themselves are made up of almost pure ice ranging in size from tiny grains to boulders as large as cars, he said, the Cassini gap is far from empty, as previously thought. Rather, he said, it holds particles of some substance much different from ice -- "dirt," he called it, although its composition remains unknown for now.

The stuff appears to be made of material much like the surface of Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, which Cassini photographed as it passed closely in mid-June, Clark said. The Phoebe photographs showed a scarred and battered rocky surface, and the dirt might well be the same kind of material, he said.

Meanwhile, the very first images of Titan's surface, taken through the dense smoggy haze of the cryptic moon's atmosphere, were "not as clear as we'd hoped," said Porco, of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

But the images -- taken from 200,000 miles away by Cassini's camera, using filtered lenses -- do show objects, fuzzy as they are, at a resolution of a dozen miles or so. That's enough to show evidence of tectonic features, Porco said in an interview with reporters.

"We can see linear features that look somewhat like a tilted H," she said. "We're sure it's an H, and not some blobby thing, and it may mean mountains, or long cracks like the San Andreas."

But it may not mean that at all, Porco cautioned.

"Maybe Titan's surface will turn out to be just a mass of tarry goop," she said. "We're not done yet."

There are many more images of Titan to come -- which will be made during much closer approaches during Cassini's four-year tour of Saturn's entire constellation of moons -- as well as radar observations from the spacecraft in October, and those should make the surface features clearer, Porco said.

In any event, the instrumented Huygens probe is due to be launched from Cassini in September and to parachute through Titan's dense atmosphere and down to the surface in January. If that succeeds, and Huygens can observe the moon's surface and radio back its findings even for a few minutes, much of the mystery moon's nature will finally become clear.
 
Oooh! I can't wait for a 'face on Titan' type thing...

:)
 
What the 'Celestia space simulator' Eboracum?

That picture is so cool I was about to ask if you could get a poster of it.
 
Some of the pictures it's taken are just amazingly beautiful. Proof that robots are better photographers.
 
Why are those clouds so brightly illuminated in certain spots and not at all in others?
 
Perhaps differences in density making some bits reflect more sunlight, though I'm confused as what appears to be clouds in some pictures looks the same as surface detail in others.

Also, I don't know if the contrast is natural or false to give a better image.
 
The Cassini mission is set to reveal the first close view of Saturn's giant moon Titan. At 1744 BST on Tuesday, the spacecraft will skim within 1200 kilometres of the moon - close enough for radar to penetrate the orange haze which, until now, has obscured attempts to view the surface.

Cassini's main camera will also map part of the icy surface, using infrared wavelengths that will not be strongly affected by the haze.

As this is a completely unexplored world, no one knows what Cassini might find. "It's a brand new surface - we're excited about everything," says Elizabeth Turtle at the University of Arizona, and a member of the imaging team.

But she is especially keen to find out whether the surface is dominated by impact craters or by other geological features, which might signify tectonic processes shaping Titan's ice crust.

Hydrocarbon controversy


The camera and radar will also be looking for lakes or seas of hydrocarbons. Telescopes on Earth have seen hints of these lakes, but on its first very distant pass by Titan in July, Cassini saw no sign of them. The controversy could be resolved this week.

"Radar can do a pretty good job of telling hydrocarbons from ice, so we're optimistic that we can say something about this issue right away," says Randolph Kirk of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The most detailed images - showing features just a few hundred metres across - will cover a small, but significant, part of Titan's surface. In January, the Huygens probe will detach from Cassini and descend through the atmosphere and land in this area. With luck, the camera and radar will find out what Huygens will land on - an ice mountain, a river of ethane or perhaps a tarry bog.

Origins of life


Meanwhile, spectrometers will be analysing light from Titan's thick atmosphere. The complex organic chemistry on Titan is thought to be similar to that of the early Earth, so it might even uncover something about the origins of life
Many other instruments will also be operating. One will measure the magnetic field around Titan, which should reveal whether there is a salty, ammonia-rich ocean deep under Titan's crust.
Another instrument called CIRS will be looking at the concentration of different chemical isotopes in the atmosphere, which will have a bearing on how Titan formed and where its supply of methane comes from.
In addition, CIRS will also take a 3D snapshot of the temperature in the atmosphere. That could reveal what drives the fierce winds on Titan - making the stratosphere rotate 10 times faster than the surface - and also show whether there are strong thermal waves that could affect Huygens' descent, says Conor Nixon of Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US.
In 44 more close passes over the next four years, Cassini will continue to observe small patches of Titan in detail, eventually laying bare its entire surface. In the meantime, Wednesday morning will see its first glimpse beamed back to Earth.


http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996571
 
There was a great Horizon documentary on this the other week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/saturn_prog_summary.shtml

Enormous rain drops that fell slowly and evaporated before they hit the ground!!

A green sky!!!

Rivers of lighter fuel!!

The discussion of possible life was interesting. Some boffin had setup aparatus to simulate Titan's atmosphere and the nitrogen and methan break down thanks to the energy of the sun and form tholins (which is what makes Titan appear organgey). All you need to do is add water and you can have amino acids. While it is too cold for water at the surface it may exist somewhere down deep and could erupt at the surface in water volcanoes providing just the chance that some kind of mixing occurs.

I was nearly wetting myself in excitement.

[edit: You can see the main Cassini probe thread here:

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16170

but I won' merge them as we'll keep this focused on the Huygens probe and the mission to Titan - unless someone really wants it merged.]
 
I was nearly wetting myself in excitement.

Tell me about it! I think (if i remember correctly) the probe will be launched next JAN (around the 15th).Whatever it discovers im sure it will have been worth the wait.
 
I saw the programme as well - fantastic in every respect

If memory serves, isn't it being released on Christmas day, and then taking about 20 days to make the landing - giving your date of 15/01/2005?
 
Glad I'm not the only one getting excited (I think the only reason I wasn't sick was that its more than likely to go belly up - panning straight into the planet or the catches never release or soemthing). ;)

Anyway here is the information from the Horizon page linke dot above:

But scientists can only hypothesise at this stage since so little is known about Titan. But on 14 January 2005, we will know much more. Huygens will separate from Cassini on Christmas Day 2004, and after a 22-day coast it will enter Titan's thick atmosphere.
 
Long hidden behind a thick veil of haze, Titan, the only known moon with an atmosphere, is ready for its close-up on Oct. 26, 2004. This visit by the Cassini spacecraft may settle intense speculation about whether this moon of Saturn harbors oceans of liquid methane and ethane beneath its coat of clouds.

Cassini will fly by Titan at a distance of 1,200 kilometers (745 miles), with closest approach at 9:44 a.m. Pacific Time. This flyby will be nearly 300 times closer than the first Cassini flyby of Titan, on July 3.

This is one of 45 planned flybys of Titan during the four-year tour. Subsequent flybys will bring the spacecraft even closer. Scientists believe Titan's atmosphere is similar to that of early Earth.

"Cassini will see Titan as it has never been seen before. We expect the onboard instruments will pierce the moon's dense atmosphere and reveal a whole new world," said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and team leader for the Cassini radar instrument.

One important goal of this flyby is to confirm scientists' model of Titan's atmosphere to prepare for the Huygens probe descent. The probe, built and managed by the European Space Agency, will be cut loose from its mother ship on Christmas Eve and will coast through the atmosphere of Titan. On the way down, the probe will sample the atmosphere with a sophisticated set of scientific instruments.

"Titan has been lying still, waiting. Cassini may finally show us if what we thought of this moon is true, and whether the Huygens probe touchdown will be a splash," said Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Huygens project manager and project scientist for the European Space Research and Technology Center, Noordwijk, Netherlands.

Eleven of Cassini's 12 instruments will be aimed at Titan during this encounter. Scientists hope to learn more about Titan's interior structure, surface, atmosphere and interaction with Saturn's magnetosphere. This first in-place sampling of Titan's atmosphere will help in understanding the atmosphere's density and composition, which, in turn, will help aid management of the Huygens probe. This flyby will mark the first time Cassini's imaging radar is used to observe Titan, and is expected to provide topographical maps and show whether there is a liquid or solid surface.

"We know our instrument will see through the haze to Titan's surface," said Dr. Robert H. Brown, team leader for the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson. "This encounter is about digging down below the atmosphere and getting our first glimpse of Titan geology."

Cassini's ion and neutral mass spectrometer will taste mysterious, subtle flavors in Titan's atmosphere. "Our instrument will scoop up a breath of Titan's puffy atmosphere during the flyby," said Roger Yelle, instrument team member, also with the University of Arizona. The experiment will measure how many molecules of different masses it gathers in the gulp of Titan's mostly nitrogen, methane-laced atmosphere.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon. It is larger than Mercury or Pluto and is the second largest moon in the solar system, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan is a cold place thought to be inhospitable to life at 95 degrees Kelvin (minus 289 degrees Fahrenheit).

Cassini has performed flawlessly since entering orbit around Saturn on June 30. The team believes that on Tuesday night, all will proceed as planned.

"This is not the same white-knuckle situation we had during Saturn orbit insertion, but there are some things we can't control," said Earl Maize, deputy project manager for the Cassini-Huygens mission at JPL. "If a spacecraft anomaly should occur, or if the weather at the tracking stations does not cooperate, the science return may be limited or lost. Although this is an unlikely scenario, the possibility still exists." Cassini will have only one opportunity to send the data back to Earth before the data are overwritten on the recorders by data from the next set of observations. The first downlink of data by NASA's Deep Space Network occurs at 6:30 p.m. PDT.

More information on the Cassini-Huygens mission is available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

Contacts:
Carolina Martinez (818) 354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Don Savage (202) 358-1727
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releases-04/20041025-pr-a.cfm
 
First close-ups

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996586
Cassini takes first close-ups of Titan

11:17 27 October 04

NewScientist.com news service


The Cassini spacecraft has sent back the first detailed pictures of the Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, showing a sharply-defined but nevertheless mysterious landscape of light and dark regions.

The images were captured up close at 1744 BST on Tuesday, as the Cassini probe approached to within 1200 kilometres of Titan - 300 times closer than its previous flyby in July 2004.

Cassini’s camera penetrated Titan’s obscuring smog by collecting light in a narrow infrared band not absorbed by the moon’s haze.

A series of high-resolution images records the approach. The last of them covers a square about 450 kilometres on a side, and each of the image’s pixels represents an area about 440 metres across. An island of bright material about the size of Sicily fills the centre of the frame.

Asteroid and comet impacts alone would not have been able to carve out the varied patterns seen in these new maps, so there are probably tectonic processes on Titan driven by internal forces, say scientists on the joint US-European venture.

But interpreting these images remains difficult. Some of the long, thin features could be canyons or ridges, for example.

And it is still too early to say for sure what the light and dark shades signify, although earlier observations from Cassini's VIMS instrument - a visual and infrared mapping spectrometer - hinted that the dark patches are icy while the white patches are rich in hydrocarbons.

Many of these questions should become easier over the next few days, as data from Cassini's other instruments is decoded.
:cool:
 
Scientists see "something", can't explain

Taken from Today's LA Times:

Cassini's Data on Titan Plentiful but Confusing
By John Johnson, Times Staff Writer

staying up much of the night analyzing the first close-up images of Titan's smog-shrouded surface, groggy scientists admitted Wednesday that they were befuddled by much of what they were seeing of Saturn's strange moon.

Was that ice on top of the continent-sized landmass they've named Xanadu? Were the dark patches along its western boundary a gasoline slush? What are the clouds doing at the south pole? And where is the methane coming from?

There were few answers forthcoming despite the bounty of images and other data sent by NASA's Cassini spacecraft late Tuesday.

"We're still mystified and not quite sure what we're looking at," Cassini mission scientist Carolyn Porco said. "There isn't much we're definitely confident about."

Assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the team of scientists presented some early findings from Cassini.

There were fewer clouds than expected, though the ones they found covered as much as 600 miles of territory. More unusual organic compounds were found in the upper atmosphere than expected, including benzene, diacetylene and propyne, making Titan's atmosphere one of the solar system's most diverse.

With all the hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, it would be a very flammable place if there were any oxygen.

Nitrogen is the largest constituent of the atmosphere, just as on Earth, which is why many scientists think Titan is a good model for what early Earth was like.

The scientific team also believes that the moon has lost three-quarters of its original atmosphere, though they don't know whether it happened gradually or all at once through some sort of cataclysmic event. There also is evidence that certain atmospheric compounds are being replaced, possibly through leakage from a giant underground methane lake.

Measurements show wind speeds comparable to Earth's. Titan also shares one characteristic with Venus in that it is a "super-rotator." The moon rotates slowly, while its atmosphere swirls much faster.

But the big questions, including what the topography looks like, remain unanswered.

original story here
 
Today's LA Times again:

I love the name of the lake "si-si the halloween cat", very scientific:)

The first radar images of Saturn's smoggy moon Titan show what appears to be a large lake, rolling ridges and lava-like flows of ice or ammonia, researchers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Thursday.

The images from the Cassini spacecraft provide the best evidence yet that lakes, or even seas, exist on Titan's surface, team members said.

The potential lake was christened "Si-Si the Halloween Cat" in honor of a scientist's daughter, who first noted the feline resemblance. It appeared as a blackened-out area about the size of Lake Tahoe on the radar image.

The Cassini team urged caution in interpreting the findings, because the black-and-white radar image covered only 1% of the moon's surface, roughly a swath of land 75 miles wide and 1,250 miles long. Over the next four years, Cassini is scheduled to make 44 more close passes of Titan, providing what scientists said should be a much clearer picture of the solar system's second-largest moon.

Some space scientists say the frozen moon could turn out to be the strangest place in the solar system. Not only is it likely to possess methane lakes and water ice, but the surface appears to be heavily carpeted in organic material, such as ethane, propane and acetylene. Those compounds had already been observed high in the moon's atmosphere.

Researchers speculate the surface might possess the consistency of powder, flakes or even sticky, plastic-like substances.

"Titan is an extremely dynamic and active place," said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini scientist from the University of Arizona. Though too cold for life at minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, Titan appears to be a massive organic chemistry laboratory, in which carbon-based substances could be endlessly combining and recombining into a wide variety of molecules.

"Titan is really covered in organics," said Ralph Lorenz, a member of the radar imaging team.

Cassini's radar also produced streaky images that scientists said could be ice ridges. Other images resembled lava-like flows. They couldn't be from an erupting volcano, however, because Titan's interior isn't hot enough to melt rock.

Though its atmosphere is much denser than Earth's, the moon is much less massive, being composed of equal proportions of water ice and rock. The flows on Titan are likely melted water and possibly ammonia, Lunine said.

Lunine speculated that the ridges were the result of the very thin surface cracking open under pressure like an eggshell.

Scientists hope to learn more when Cassini sends its Huygens probe to the surface in January. If it survives the landing, Huygens is designed to measure the atmosphere, as well as the surface, possibly answering questions as to whether Titan has a gloppy, sticky, powdery or rocky surface — or all of the above.

The $3.2-billion mission is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
 
TMS said:
The potential lake was christened "Si-Si the Halloween Cat" in honor of a scientist's daughter, who first noted the feline resemblance.

I know those folks at NASA are crazy but I really wonder if he called his daughter "Si-Si the Halloween Cat" - I wouldn't have put it past Bob Geldof but........
#
You can imagine the scene:

"Oh and meet my son Ramtor the Christmas Hamster"
 
Can someone point out to me where the cat is in that landscape?

At first I was thinking the dark blob to the far left that's sort of got a tail, then I decided that was a bit lame. Now I'm plain baffled.
 
It looks like we have 44 more flybys to look forward to, with our next 'fix' coming on Dec 13th. From the New York Times:


PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 30 - After the Cassini spacecraft's close-up photography and radar imaging of Saturn's largest moon, the first parting of its veil of dense smog, scientists know this much for sure about Titan: it is one of the strangest worlds in the solar system.

"Most of what we see is very alien," said Dr. Laurence A. Soderblom, a planetary scientist with the United States Geological Survey.

The surface of Titan seen so far is a mosaic of bright, or rugged, regions bordering dark expanses where the terrain is generally smooth and may include lakes of liquid methane and ethane. One such "lake" appears to be as large as Lake Champlain.

Some places resemble a cracked eggshell, with thin bright threads running like fissures through the landscape. Broad grooves near the equator look like ridges, perhaps formed by volcanic eruptions not of molten lava but icy water or hydrocarbons.

No mountains or deep valleys are in sight. Streaks across the flat terrain may be dunes of windblown carbon-based compounds, what passes for topsoil on Titan. Such organic material, either sticky and tarlike or powdery or slushy, may cover a "bedrock" of water ice to depths of a few hundred feet. Much of it, possibly ethane, propane and acetylene, must form in chemical reactions on the surface or rain out of the smoggy sky known to be rich in methane and now found to contain benzene.

With this abundance of hydrocarbons, the sky and surface of Titan would be dangerously flammable, like a petroleum refinery primed to erupt in fire, if there were any free oxygen there.

So what are scientists of the $3.2 billion Cassini mission to make of such a world?

"The surface is like a jigsaw puzzle for which the picture is not provided on the box cover," said Dr. Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona.

Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, where the Cassini mission is controlled, likened the problem of understanding Titan to reading a mystery novel. "Each time you flip the page you learn something new," he said, "but you don't know the whole story until you've read the whole book."

Some early interpretations of the Titanian surface lean heavily on what was already known from ground-based and previous spacecraft observations about the moon's nitrogen-methane atmosphere, or from comparisons with findings of other icy moons, notably Jupiter's Ganymede.

Dr. Soderblom said it made "a minute amount of sense" that, given the composition of Titan's atmosphere, the fluids that might have shaped some of the landscape were mixtures of methane and ethane. Citing observations of a phenomenon that is probably similar on Ganymede, he said some features on Titan could be from volcanic eruptions, upwellings of water ice mixed with ammonia and methane, which would lower the fluids' freezing point.

Dr. Lunine said the fact that no craters had been seen "tells us that Titan's surface is young," its basins filled in with material from such volcanic upwellings or hydrocarbon precipitation from the sky.

Other remote-sensing instruments on Cassini detected evidence that Titan had lost three-quarters of its original atmosphere. Much of its light nitrogen seems to have escaped over time. But the methane content appears to have remained constant.

It could be that Titan has replenished methane escaping from the atmosphere, said Dr. Tobias Owen of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "Where did it come from?" he added. "That is the question."

Scientists suggested that some atmospheric hydrocarbons were being replenished from underground sources of liquid methane.

Both before and after Cassini's close encounter, scientists often reminded themselves and others not to make hasty interpretations or be discouraged. They recalled the experience of the earliest spacecraft explorations of Mars. In the first three flybys of Mars, in the 1960's, Dr. Owen pointed out, the Mariner spacecraft "happened by chance to go over the most boring portion" of that planet, where the unrelieved cratered landscape invited comparisons with the desolate surface of Earth's Moon.

Not until Mariner 9 began orbiting Mars in 1971, photographing its entirety, did scientists see the volcanic peaks and wide canyons, dry channels where water probably once flowed and other traces of a dynamic past. This renewed speculation that life might have existed there.

Scientists do not expect to find life on bitterly cold Titan, 290 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At best, they hope that in the dynamic chemistry of Titan's atmosphere, and possibly its surface, to find insights into how life originated in Earth's early history. Titan is the only moon with a substantial atmosphere; the main constituent of it is nitrogen, as is Earth's. But that will take time and patience, scientists say.

Cassini's cameras and infrared sensors surveyed only part of one side of Titan, and its radar returned images of only a narrow strip representing no more than 1 percent of the surface. Over the next four years, the craft is to make 44 more flybys of Titan. On 25 of these, scientists expect the radar to explore at least a quarter of Titan's landscape.

Flight controllers said that Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn and the planet's retinue of moons since June 30, was performing flawlessly and had already adjusted its course for another encounter with Titan on Dec. 13.

Then, on Dec. 24, the spacecraft is to release a smaller craft for a more intimate exploration. The Huygens craft, built and operated by the European Space Agency, is to enter Titan's atmosphere on Jan. 14 and parachute to the surface, collecting data and taking pictures all the way.

If it survives the landing, Huygens may be able to transmit views of the surface for 30 minutes, perhaps long enough to answer some of the questions about a frozen land of water ice carpeted in gooey, powdery or plasticlike carbon-based compounds. Or Huygens may splash down in a lake of methane and ethane, sinking silently to the depths of the mystery.
 
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