This is so cool. I love reading this kind of news.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/1 ... index.html

(CNN) -- Huygens has arrived.

The probe landed on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan this morning around 7:45 ET, reported elated scientists from the European Space Agency, who are eagerly awaiting data about the cloud-shrouded moon.

"We have a signal. We know that Huygens is alive meaning the dream is alive," said Jean-Jacques Dordain director general for ESA which designed Huygens. "This is already an engineering success and we will see, later this afternoon, if this is a scientific success."

Grinning scientists watching from the ESA operations center in Germany said the first obstacle -- a tricky atmospheric entry -- had been a great engineering feat. Time will tell if all of Huygens' precious data will reach Earth. The probe will continue sending data until its batteries run out or Cassini, the satellite orbiting Saturn relaying Huygens' signal, passes over the moon's horizon in about two hours' time.

"So far so good," said David Southwood, director of science for ESA. "The signal has been solid for a long time."

The saucer-shaped probe is completing the final hours of its 2.2 billion-mile mission to study the icy world. It plunged through the orange clouds of Saturn's moon Titan early Friday morning deploying three parachutes to slow down from a blistering reentry speed.

Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Huygens project scientist, said the first data from a Doppler wind experiment were reaching Earth and more data would arrive throughout the morning. Radio telescopes around the world are tracking Huygens' signal.

When the first images arrive this afternoon, scientists will have their long-anticipated glimpse at an alien world.

"It's going to be the most exotic place we've ever seen," said Candice Hansen, a scientist for the Cassini-Huygens mission. "We've never landed on the surface of an icy satellite. We know from our pictures that there are very different kinds of geological processes."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is an unprecedented $3.3-billion effort between NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's space program to study Saturn and its 33 known moons. The two vehicles were launched together from Florida in 1997.

"The mission is to explore the entire Saturnian system in considerably greater detail than we have ever been able to do before: the atmosphere, the internal structure, the satellites, the rings, the magnetosphere," said Cassini program manager Bob Mitchell at NASA.

The Huygens probe, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, has been spinning silently toward Titan since it detached from the Cassini spacecraft on December 24. Cassini will remain in orbit around Saturn until at least July 2008.

The mission "will probably help answer some of the big questions that NASA has in general about origins and where we came from and where life came from," Mitchell said.

Titan's atmosphere, a murky mix of nitrogen, methane and argon, resembles Earth's more than 3.8 billion years ago. Scientists think the moon may shed light on how life began.

Finding living organisms, however, is a remote possibility. "It is not out of the question, but it is certainly not the first place I would look," Hansen said. "It's really very cold." A lack of sunlight has put Titan into a deep-freeze. Temperatures hover around -292 F (-180 C) making liquid water scarce and hindering chemical reactions needed for organic life.
New discoveries

The mysteries of Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, have always enticed researchers. Scientists are perplexed why Saturn, a gas-giant composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, releases more energy than it absorbs from faint sunlight. Titan is also the only moon in the solar system to retain a substantial atmosphere, one even thicker than Earth's.

The 703-pound, battery-powered Huygens probe parachuted through Titan's clouds of methane and nitrogen for two-and-a-half hours, sampling gases and capturing panoramic pictures along the way.

Huygens hit the upper atmosphere 789 miles (1,270 km) above the moon at a speed of about 13,700 mph (22,000 km/h). A series of three parachutes slowed the craft to just 15 mph (24 km/h). Chutes and special insulation protect Huygens from temperature swings and violent air currents. Strong winds -- in excess of 311 mph (500 km/h) -- buffeted the craft, capable of dragging Huygens sideways after its parachute was deployed.

Its sensors can deduce wind speed, atmospheric pressure and the conductivity of Titan's air. Methane clouds and possibly hydrocarbon rain will be analyzed by an onboard gas chromatograph. A microphone will listen for thunder.

Three rotating cameras are snapping panoramic views of the moon, capturing up to 1,100 images. A radar altimeter is mapping Titan's topography and a special lamp illuminated the probe's landing spot to help determine the surface composition.

Engineers were confident that Huygens and its suite of six sensitive instruments would survive the descent.

"From an engineering standpoint, I'm very confident in a positive outcome," said Shaun Standley, an ESA systems engineer for Huygens at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "We've been over this again and again for the last three years fine-tuning this."

Cassini crossed Saturn's rings without mishap in June 2004 and produced the most revealing photos yet of the rings and massive gas-giant. A problem with the design of an antennae on Cassini almost scrapped Huygens' mission, but engineers altered the spacecrafts' flight plans to resolve the transmission problem.

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This is also interesting to check out:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050114.html

Awesome. Shows you how shitty NASA is...

It's easy to say that. But NASA has done some amazing things over the years along with their blunders.

I just cant wait to see new pictures from another planet. Stuff like that always gets me fired up. It's just astonishing to think about, and gives me that feeling of wonder and curiosity.

Me too.

Jan needs to get to this thread pronto.

here's a picture from there

interesting what else would they find there.

isn't that Mars? I can't wait to see the pics, cool stuff.

no, that picture is from titan from this huygens ship

Those stones are really rounded. There must be some flowing fluid to do that.

--PunkDavid

This is gonna be completely awesome, I love space pictures.

Thanks for posting Buggy. It will be very interesting to read about their findings.

Wow. How cool are those pics.

Hot damn!

that's cool, they got these 3 pictures and information that shows this planet has islands, oceans, rivers shorelines similar to earth

Interesting. What I've read so far is that it looks like some sort of liquid once flowed there (methane probably), but not water (at the temps the planet has now, water would instantly freeze.

Another new pic:

Archive for photos:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassi ... arch_Agent)_archive_1.html

Another article:

Huygens Probe Returns First Images of Titan's Surface
By Peter de Selding
Space News Staff Writer
posted: 14 January 2005
3:30 p.m. ET

This story was updated at 6:27 p.m. EST.

DARMSTADT, Germany -- The first pictures revealing the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan, were shown from Europe's Huygens probe, showing what look like drainage channels on the surface of what until today has been a planet totally hidden from view.

The image unveiling marked the end of a successful journey for the hardy Huygens probe and the culmination of 25 years of work by mission managers, scientists, engineers and supporters.

“The European Space Agency deserves a tremendous amount of credit,” said NASA’s Al Diaz, NASA's associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, while appearing to hold back tears during one of many press briefings on the probes status today. “There will only be [one] first successful landing on Titan, and this was it.”

Huygens' first image, taken from an altitude of 16 kilometers, has a ground resolution of about 40 meters, said Martin Tomasko, principal investigator for Huygens' Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR). Tomasko said that Huygens research teams now have about 350 pictures to work with.

The image appears to show ravines that could have been carved by the liquid hydrocarbons thought to cover much of Titan's surface. The ravines, stubby drainage-like channels, appeared to funnel toward what appeared to be a shoreline, researchers said during their initial reactions to the image.

"If it's not a sea, it appears to be a lake of tar-like material," said John Zarnecky, principal investigator for the Huygens' Surface Science Package, which is taking data from the surface of Titan.

Zarnecky said the 350 images taken by Huygens of Titan's surface were only about half the anticipated photographic harvest researchers were expecting.

Huygens was originally expected to send more than 700 pictures taken during its 2.5-hour descent to the Titan surface, but one of the two communications channels on the satellite apparently malfunctioned, cutting by about half the number of images received by NASA's orbiting Cassini satellite and relayed to mission control here.


Resounding success

Officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) continued to characterize Huygens as a resounding success despite the disabled communications line, saying almost all Huygens data was sent in duplicate version on both channels and thus has been preserved.

"You have enough information in this one photo to produce several scientific papers," Huygens mission manager Jean-Pierre Lebreton said.

Titan's thick atmosphere has hidden its surface from view from passing satellites.

"Today we are discovering a new world," ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.

During a previous interview with SPACE.com, Tomasko said that finding a new understanding of Titan's surface was one of the fundamental goals of his team's DISR instrument.

"We hope to ultimately get 20 panaromic images," Tomasko said then via telephone, adding that during its parachute descent, the DISR camera had a resolution akin to that of the human eye.

A teary landing

There was much celebration at Huygens mission control here when the successfully landed on Titan between 1345-1346 local time here (CET), which was about 7:45-7:46 a.m. EST.

But there was even more jubilation at 11:19 a.m. EST, when confirmation that Huygens had relayed quality data home.

"We have it? We have it!" said one mission team member before the mission control room erupted with applause and triumphant shouts

Communications signals took just over an hour to traverse the vast distances between Titan and Earth.

U.S. and European officials had trouble holding back tears and cheers as they learned, after long minutes of tense staring into computer screens at mission control center here, that data from the descent was finally reaching Earth.

"We have a scientific success,'' Dordain said in a press briefing. "We will now be able to start breaking Titan's secrets."

Earlier in the day, Dordain and other ESA officials were touting Huygens as a marvel of human engineering for its spot-on landing and near-clockwork descent toward Titan.

Originally expected to send perhaps 2.5 hours worth of data to the NASA's Cassini orbiter for later delivery to Earth, Huygens was still sending signals five hours after activation, and researchers said the probe's robust battery could last up to seven hours total.

Huygens has also been sending limited data directly to Earth, where it has been picked up by a network of telescopes. The detailed data about what it found on its way through Titan's thick atmosphere has been sent to NASA's Cassini orbiter overhead.

The communications channel glitch has the only Huygens hiccup that mission managers have reported. While the redundant transmission channel is not working properly, only one of the probe's six instruments - a Doppler tool to study Titan's winds - is dependent solely on that channel and may be compensated for by data from ground-based observations, mission scientists said.

NASA's Cassini orbiter has also sent an initial data set of its own to ground teams. It will be several hours more before scientists decipher this information. But the mission has already cleared several of its biggest hurdles and ha s demonstrated enough to be declared a major event in the history of space science.

"This is a historic event," ESA Science Director David Southwood said. "The torch has now been passed from the engineers who delivered the probe and got the data sent to Cassini to the scientists who will evaluate the data."

Choking back tears, Diaz, who worked on the Cassini-Huygens mission for years before taking up his current post, said "It's up to ESA to take this data and turn it into science."

Diaz and Dordain embraced after they learned that Huygens' initial data was received by Cassini and ground telescopes confirming the initial success of the mission.

Officials said Cassini would continue to send its data packets in the coming hours. It is this data that will disclose details of what Huygens saw on its two-hour descent.

SPACE.com Staff Writer Tariq Malik contributed to this report from New York City.
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There will always be problems with missions like this. It's not like you can do a test flight before the real one.

Just imagine the amount of work, knowledge, and planning that went into this mission. The commitment of many participants over such a long period of time - it's just amazing. It's wonderful to see the mission succeed.

I'm a huge proponent of fixing shit on Earth before we go and poke around the universe, but none the less, this is pretty cool stuff.


They've posted sounds now.

And some new pics.

The 10 year old in me who wanted to be an astronaut has reared his head and turned me into a geek reading this thread, and I'm loving this post in particular.

This is some awesome shit. They've been talking about this forever, and it's finally happened. I can barely believe that I just listened to those recordings, as simple as they may sound.

"A composite image shows what appear to be drainage channels and a sharp boundary between light, elevated terrain and darker lower areas."

Methane rain, evaporating lakes, flowing rivers, and water ice-volcanoes all likely exist on Saturn's moon Titan, according to preliminary analyses of recent images taken by the successful Huygens lander. A snaking and branching riverbed is identified with the dark channel near the top of the above image, while a dark lakebed is identified across the image bottom. Both the riverbed and lakebed were thought to be dry at the time the image was taken but contained a flowing liquid - likely methane - in the recent past. Titan's surface was found to appear strangely similar to Earth even though it is so cold that methane flows and water freezes into rock-hard ice. Although the Huygens probe has now run out of power, the images it returned will likely be studied for decades to come. The Cassini mothership is scheduled to continue to orbit Saturn and return images for several more years.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050124.html