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Huygens Probe Prepares for Saturn Moon Landing

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the setting-down dept.

Nathan writes "A probe is about to land on one of Saturn's 35 moons, Titan. The probe is a collaboration with NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's space program. The probe is apparently about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. This landing should lead scientists toward new information about the atmosphere and the magnetosphere."

5 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Timeline and (better) coverage... by John+Miles · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... at SpaceFlight Now

    It'd be worth staying up for, but the last time I did that, I jinxed the Mars Polar Lander. :(

    If the Huygens timeline executes as planned, it will rank among the coolest engineering achievements in history. It will also have happened thanks to one guy who kept his eye on the ball when nobody else was paying attention.

    --
    Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
  2. VLBI observations of Huygens' descent by zennor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The data transmitted by Huygens will be uploaded to the Cassini spaceprobe and then transmitted by Cassini back to Earth several times. This data will be received by the NASA DSN dishes such as that a Tidbinbilla near Canberra in Australia.

    Separate to this will be a unique experimental observation organised by JIVE, the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe that will involve 17 radio telescopes around the world including the Parkes dish in NSW. They will monitor the weak signal of the Huygens probe directly to detct any doppler shift in the signal. Using VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) astronomers hope to be able to pinpoint the entry of Huygens into Titan's atmosphere to within 1 km. As it descends under parachute they also hope to use doppler shifts to measure the speed of the wind at different levels in the atmosphere. Should be an interesting observation.

    (Disclaimer; I work for one of the institutes involved in this experiment)

  3. But Not ESA Either by Z+Chameleon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Beagle 2 was not an ESA probe but rather a British project which piggybacked on ESA's Mars Express orbiter (which is going strong by the way).

  4. Re:Probe size by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Funny
    An original Beetle, or a Super Beetle? Or even a new water-cooled "New Beetle"?

    After NASA's previous troubles with imperial measurements, I'm glad to see that they're moving to standard pop-scientific units. The standard unit of volume is based on the Super Beetle, since that was the current model when this benchmark first came into widespread use.

    BTW, the standard Beetle has recently been redefined in terms of human hair; it is now defined as exactly 1.374569443*10^14 cubic human hair widths. The length of a football field and the distance from New York to San Francisco have similarly been redefined as hair multiples. These recent harmonizations will help bring a new consistency to science news stories across all media outlets.

  5. www.esa.int by dolmen.fr · · Score: 5, Informative

    I won't blame anyone who hasn't RTFA for this news, because here is the really interesting link: the ESA (European Space Agency) portal.
    A 346 words article from India Daily is not the most relevant for an ESA project.

    I hope /. moderators would care a bit more when posting news. Recently the interesting links were often missing. A link to a press agency article may be interesting to some, but we have other sources for that. I expect a bit more from a /. news: the poster should at list post links to official sites with deeper information.