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Huygens Lands on Titan!
2005.01.14 (Fri) 11:19
The Huygens probe landed successfully on Saturn's moon of Titan sometime around 7:45AM EST this morning, and successfully began sending back science data, the first of which was received on Earth around 11:19AM EST.
The magnitude of this accomplishment is beyond belief. Think of the difficulties that have plagued Mars-bound probes, including the ESA's Mars Beagle and a host of failed missions over the years. Mars is 142 million miles from the Sun, with a thin atmosphere compared to Earth's, and average temperatures around -81F. Titan, on the other hand, is a whopping 887 million miles from the Sun, with a thick atmosphere that creates surface pressure approximately 1.5 times greater than Earth's, and low temperatures around -294F. Our hats are off to the folks at NASA and the ESA who pulled this off.
From what we know so far, the Huygens probe landed and went on to transmit a signal for at least two hours, which far exceeded the 5-30 minutes that the batteries were expected to last. In fact, it appears that the probe was still sending out data for four hours or more, even after Cassini turned toward Earth to transmit data back to us. With this much data, we are hopeful that we'll get some fantastic information.
More to come over the coming hours and days as the data is gathered and assembled into images and information.
[Update: Unscrewing the Inscrutable is live-blogging Huygens news as events unfold. Sure, it already landed, but there is plenty of good stuff yet to come! If you can't stay glued to the NASA TV coverage (due to, for example, being at work today), this is the next best place to be.]
[Update 1-15: We have the first few pictures released by the ESA in our next Rant, and some additional pictures in another Rant.]
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[ Filed under: % Science & Technology ]
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