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.'"

Comments

I'm so stoked about this

[multiplexo]

I wish that NASA would junk ISS and the Shuttle and direct more money towards probes such as this, or the Martian rovers or the new Messenger probe to Mercury or putting more probes onto the surface and into the atmosphere of Venus to add to what we learned from the Soviet Venera probes.

We learn a lot more from a single one of these probes than we do from having a couple of starving astronauts endlessly orbiting the earth in a big tin can full of their own garbage.

More detailed information...

[andreMA]

...in this 1.3 MB PDF, which includes timelines for both the release and Titan encounter, and some pretty in-depth discussion of the science instruments on Huygens.

Re:FYI

[Tablizer]

You will be able to watch this on one of you CSPAN channels tonight.

I can summarize what you will see. Since there will be no images of the seperation until a day or so later, at which time it would only be a distant speck, you will see a bunch of nervious nerds watching their monitors. And...

if the separation goes well:

"Yeah! We did it!"

if the separation is zarked:

"Oh shit! There goes my life's @&#* work!"

The odd thing is that once separation happens, there is only one-way communication with the probe and Huygens has no guidence rockets. In fact, it will be sleeping via timer until just before entry. There is no way to alter it's course, change parameters, or nothing. If we found out between that time that it will land in a pile of quicksand or the atmospheric models are totally off (messing up parachute timing), there is no retargeting or changing the mission plan.

It is considered primarily an atmospheric mission, and landing is more or less a bonus. But I think the coolest thing would be to land in an oil sea and see giant waves. The waves can be taller on Titan because of lower gravity. They could be giant and slow-rolling. It will be a great mission if it makes it to the surface while transmitting, but a lot can go wrong. Parachutes have been a problematic technology in the past. I hope some bone-head did not put something on backward, like they did that Utah-crashing probe. Galileo's Jupiter penetrator also had parachute problems, but luckily recovered by shear chance. And, they already found a transmitter problem in the probe. They compensated for it by changing Cassini's flight path to avoid too much Dopler shifting.

I wish they split it into two smaller probes which shared instruments between them to reduce the chance of complete loss. But, that is generally still more expensive than one bigger probe.

Good Luck, Little Probee