Cassini's Huygens Probe Rendezvous with Titan
im333mfg writes "Tonight at 7:08pm PST, the Cassini spacecraft will be releasing the much anticipated Huygens Probe for a rendezvous with the Saturn moon Titan. It will be making a 22 day journey to the moon, and end up entering the atmosphere sometime on January 14th. 'Titan is one of the remaining puzzles of the solar system - while Cassini's imaging cameras and radar instrument have begun to reveal the details of its surface, the Huygens probe will be the first spacecraft to venture beneath Titan's thick clouds.'"
In addition to the numerous links in the post, here is an arcticle by the BBC:1 12917. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4
Some pretty pictures and informative text.
Sauer
You will be able to watch this on one of you CSPAN channels tonight.
(in the US)
I watched the last couple of Mars mission Events and it was GREAT! (ok i'm a space geek)
CSPAN, its not just for politics anymore!
For those interested, folks in the channel #space on irc.freenode.net will be discussing this. Please join in!
Y
no sig.
BBC
It's GMT -8 hrs
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The problem was not explosive bolts. The likely cause improper mounting of the gravity-switches that would have started off the parachute deployment. It hasn't been determined if the problem was that they were put in backwards by the technicians contrary to the plans or if the plans were not clear enough. The Mishap Investigation Board is still working on determining the cause and procedures to fix the problems. See their Status Report #4.
All is not lost though. Some of the samples were salvaged.