Huygens to reach Titan

[_Naturalist_]

According to this timeline (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMXYGQ3K3E_0.html) the Huygens probe will reach the atmosphere of Titan 11:13 CET today.

EDIT: Apparently not today, sorry about that ;-)

More links:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

[trillian]

The NASA site says it will descend this Friday (not today)- and only gets to transmit for 2 hours!!

Thanks for the reminder! Should be some interesting data if it works.

trillian

[_Naturalist_]

Right you are, I haven't had breakfast yet. Sorry about that, everyone...

[Schneibster]

Thanks, this is great reference material. Let's keep this bumped until after the descent on Friday.

[Abacus]

Let us all hope that Huygens sends us a postcard.

[g-21-lto]

Let us all hope that Huygens sends us a postcard.
If everything goes according to plan, it should be taking and transmitting photos and other measurements throughout its descent plus some time on the surface.

Edit: if it survives landing. This guy is meant for another purpose but think of him on a second level here: :banghead:

[Abacus]

12 hours to go.

[wonkothesane]

I have wanted to see this since I was a kid!

I sure hope it works...(I hate to turn on the news tomorrow and hear "Nasa experts expect the probe's failure was due to a faulty switch, and the fact that the parachute was installed upside-down.")

[rebelnerd]

I can remember as a kid in the early 60's, my father waking me up to watch the Mercury and Gemini liftoffs. I feel the same sense of excitement that I had then about the Huygens probe and Titan. I don't know why it appeals to me more than the Mars rovers or the flybys, but it does. Go Huygens! :thumbs:

[Abacus]

I have wanted to see this since I was a kid!

I sure hope it works...(I hate to turn on the news tomorrow and hear "Nasa experts expect the probe's failure was due to a faulty switch, and the fact that the parachute was installed upside-down.")

At least this time around it wouldn't be NASA's fault. Huygens is a European Space Agency (ESA) probe.

[lenrek]

Let us all hope that Huygens sends us a postcard.

Hopefully it will be an excellent image for my PC wallpaper... :D

[_Naturalist_]

I can remember as a kid in the early 60's, my father waking me up to watch the Mercury and Gemini liftoffs. I feel the same sense of excitement that I had then about the Huygens probe and Titan. I don't know why it appeals to me more than the Mars rovers or the flybys, but it does. Go Huygens! :thumbs:
As little as we still know about Mars, it's much more familiar than the mysterious Titan. It's very very exciting.

[tommyc]

At least this time around it wouldn't be NASA's fault. Huygens is a European Space Agency (ESA) probe.
Yeah, but after the Beagle 2 triumph last year, that should fill us all with confidence!
http://linuxdevices.com/files/misc/beagle2_clamshell2_sm.jpg

[wonkothesane]

At least this time around it wouldn't be NASA's fault. Huygens is a European Space Agency (ESA) probe.

Oh that's right.

Well then, everything on the probe should work just fine. :)

[Abacus]

Huygens Has Landed! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4175099.stm)

Too cool! :thumbs:

[g-21-lto]

I have wanted to see this since I was a kid!

I sure hope it works...(I hate to turn on the news tomorrow and hear "Nasa experts expect the probe's failure was due to a faulty switch, and the fact that the parachute was installed upside-down.")
"And the failure to accurately translate between the metric and the English systems of measurement." Didn't that happen on some space probe flight? I'm drawing a blank on when...

[Shadowy Man]

"And the failure to accurately translate between the metric and the English systems of measurement." Didn't that happen on some space probe flight? I'm drawing a blank on when...

Mars Observer

[HaysooChreesto!]

Any info or images yet? I was watching CNN this morning right before I left for work and 10 seconds before I walked out the door it was confirmed that Huygens and touched down and sent information to Cassini.
I could be wrong but I believe rather than just the three minutes they were hoping for they believed they have four hours.

[Atheos]

This really is exciting news! Thanks, everyone for sharing my fascination with this!

-Atheos

[Jesse]

Any info or images yet? I was watching CNN this morning right before I left for work and 10 seconds before I walked out the door it was confirmed that Huygens and touched down and sent information to Cassini.
I could be wrong but I believe rather than just the three minutes they were hoping for they believed they have four hours. The CNN story (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/14/huygens.titan/index.html) says "The first pictures of Titan's surface will be released by ESA about 2:45 ET." Keep your eye on the ESA Huygens page (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html)!

[MrDarwin]

Dammit, I want pictures!!!!

But I'm willing to bet that the atmosphere is dense and hazy enough that whatever pictures do get sent back are going to be awfully anticlimactic... but wouldn't it be really, really cool if they showed something moving around?

[Jesse]

Whoo hoo! CNN's got a picture up from the descent, showing what looks like rivers and a shoreline:

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/TECH/space/01/14/huygens.titan/top.main.titan.shoreline.jpg

edit: the planetary.org Huygens weblog (http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog_0114.html) says: We have now seen the first picture, and Marty Tomasko, the Principal Investigator for the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer, remarked that the patterns of squiggly dark lines on a bright surface looked like "drainage channels" to him. It is certainly a complex surface that we saw! It was one of over 350 images Tomasko said they had, taken from an altitude of 60 kilometers (about 35 miles), which should be below the cloud deck.

The MSNBC Space News page (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3033063/) should also have regular updates, right now the page has the excellent headline Probe spots alien rivers on Saturn moon (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6823880/), and another similar picture of the landing region:

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050114/050114_titan2_hlg_12p.hlarge.jpg

[Nice Squirrel]

Dendritic drainage patten. What might flow out in that part of the system? Liquid methane?

Interesting none the less. :thumbs:


Hopefully my villiage will come into sight. :p

[Jesse]

The ESA Huygens website (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html) now has a small early pic from the surface up:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/landing_01_H.jpg

The planetary.org Huygens blog (http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog_0114.html) comments: Here is the first image from Huygens! Little information has been published with this image, but it's safe to speculate that it was taken from the surface of Titan. In the foreground, we see rounded stones. Any geologist worth her salt thinks of one thing and one thing only when she sees round rocks: some river of some liquid has rolled broken chunks around, wearing down their edges, making rounded cobbles. Or, as United States Geological Survey geologist Larry Soderblom remarked to me: "We've got rolling stones!" Is that enough speculation for you?

[_Naturalist_]

The image from the surface was a little more than I dared to expect. This is extremely cool.

[|2eason]

The drainage channels don't appear to be running into the 'sea' :confused:

[Thanatoast]

Very cool! :thumbs: :cool:

Or perhaps I should say "very cold"; those are some mighty low temps! ;)

Does anyone know if the've given up on finding some sort of "oceans" of liquid CH4 or other hydrocarbons, or is the "dark terrain" seen in images like these (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia06086.html) totally solid?

What I found strange was that the dark areas on the surface somewhat correspond to the imagined "oceanography" displayed in a map of Titan published in this (http://www.sjgames.com/transhumanspace/deepbeyond/) RPG book, which came out about 2 years before Cassini reached the Saturn system. (sorry, couldn't find an image of the map itself)

[Jesse]

The drainage channels don't appear to be running into the 'sea' :confused: The ESA site now has captions on a few pictures, and the one for that picture says they are: This is one of the first raw images returned by the ESA Huygens probe during its successful descent. It was taken from an altitude of 16.2 kilometres with a resolution of approximately 40 metres per pixel. It apparently shows short, stubby drainage channels leading to a shoreline. Also, the caption on the picture from the surface says "It shows the surface of Titan with ice blocks strewn around", so I guess they aren't rocks.

[beausoleil]

The drainage channels don't appear to be running into the 'sea' :confused:

Looks like an impact crater with its interior in shadow to the right, with drainage down a topographic high from the rim to the top right.

Or maybe not. Hard to tell where the scence is illuminated from.

[Duck!]

I post this on the other thread. I didn't know there was a new thread about the Titan landing:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/landing_01_H.jpg
Holy shit! That's the surface of fucking Titan! Isn't that the most awesome thing you've ever seen?

When the first pics of Mars were broadcast after the Pathfinder mission, most people I knew were underwhelmed, and I bet they'll have the same shrugged shoulder attitude to this.

I think it's ultra cool. To be able to see a picture taken from the surface of a moon of Saturn!


Duck!

[Writer@Large]

Fact check:

Titan *is* the furthest from Earth we've ever actually *landed* something, yes?

--W@L

[Duck!]

Titan *is* the furthest from Earth we've ever actually *landed* something, yes?As far as I know, we've deliberately *crashed* things into Jupiter and maybe Saturn and maybe some of their moons, but I don't think anything has actually landed on a planetary surface this far away from Earth.


Duck!

[Abacus]

Fact check:

Titan *is* the furthest from Earth we've ever actually *landed* something, yes?

--W@L

Correct. The Galileo probe was crashed into Jupiter a couple years ago, but Jupiter is closer to Earth than Saturn.

[g-21-lto]

The image from the surface was a little more than I dared to expect. This is extremely cool.
Ditto to that!

Also, on the ESA's released picture from ~16 km altitude (this one (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMCXM71Y3E_1.html)) along the "shoreline" feature you can see what look an awful lot to me like barrier islands. Thin, elongated, and close to shore. The rivers further inland also demonstrate a few meanders like river systems on Earth. If you look in the "ocean", you can see several areas along the coast that appear to be shallower than others or to have more material suspended in them (lower right, upper right). Of course, that could just be low clouds obscuring the view.

The ESA site now has captions on a few pictures, and the one for that picture says they are: Also, the caption on the picture from the surface says "It shows the surface of Titan with ice blocks strewn around", so I guess they aren't rocks.
But wouldn't the same argument (that the presence of rounded, rather than angular, chunks of ice means the presence of a transporting medium like liquid) still hold? Especially with the number of fully rounded ice/rocks apparent -- not just a few flukes.

[rebelnerd]

As little as we still know about Mars, it's much more familiar than the mysterious Titan. It's very very exciting.

That it is, I can hardly wait for hi-res images to be available.

[um3k]

The ESA site now has captions on a few pictures, and the one for that picture says they are: Also, the caption on the picture from the surface says "It shows the surface of Titan with ice blocks strewn around", so I guess they aren't rocks.
They might as well be. Titan's ice is as hard as granite.

[Jesse]

Correct. The Galileo probe was crashed into Jupiter a couple years ago, but Jupiter is closer to Earth than Saturn. How come the Galileo probe didn't have cameras along with all the other instruments? It would have been interesting to see the clouds (or whatever the atmosphere would look like) from the inside.

[Jesse]

But wouldn't the same argument (that the presence of rounded, rather than angular, chunks of ice means the presence of a transporting medium like liquid) still hold? Especially with the number of fully rounded ice/rocks apparent -- not just a few flukes. Yeah, I'd guess the same argument about roundedness would probably hold for ice boulders. And as um3k said, at those temperatures ice would be much harder than it is on earth.

[_Naturalist_]

Now that we know that there is more or less flat terrain (icy/rocky) and almost certainly some kind of liquid, I think they should plan for a more extensive exploration of Titan. How about rovers, boats (submarines?) and even balloons? There is already some experience with both rovers and balloons on other worlds...

[Sven]

How come the Galileo probe didn't have cameras along with all the other instruments? It would have been interesting to see the clouds (or whatever the atmosphere would look like) from the inside.
I can imagine two reasons:
(1) Extra weight - extra cost.
(2) Two much interference by electromagnetic phenomena caused by the storms of Jupiter to be able to send anything.

[Hopeful Monsters]

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-01/15/xinsrc_392010215083746809275.jpg

A triumph for science, technology, engineering and mathematics - even though one of the data channels failed, they got more data than they could have hoped.

I hope this remains in the news as findings and analysis continue to emerge.

Among others things, this mission utilised the gravity of other planets to gain velocity and to reach Saturn and Titan, gravity being a force denied by some of the 'Goddidit' brigade. The mission required - inter alia - precise calculations of the orbits of other planets, their gravitational field, variation in axis of rotation (the Chandler-wobble) and Cassini-Huygens' response to these.

Human achievement - yes :notworthy

'Goddidit' - no :Cheeky:

[Jesse]

New images out on the ESA website:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/Picture2.jpg This composite was produced from images returned yesterday, 14 January 2005, by ESA's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. It shows the boundary between the lighter-coloured uplifted terrain, marked with what appear to be drainage channels, and darker lower areas. These images were taken from an altitude of about 8 kilometres with a resolution of about 20 metres per pixel.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA07232.jpg This image was returned yesterday, 14 January 2005, by ESA's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. This is the coloured view, following processing to add reflection spectra data, gives a better indication of the actual colour of the surface. Initially thought to be rocks or ice blocks, they are more pebble-sized. The two rock-like objects just below the middle of the image are about 15 centimetres (left) and 4 centimetres (centre) across respectively, at a distance of about 85 centimetres from Huygens. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. There is also evidence of erosion at the base of these objects, indicating possible fluvial activity.

http://www.esa.int/images/Picture3_XL,0.jpg
Click here for larger version (http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/Picture3.jpg) This composite was produced from images returned yesterday, 14 January 2005, by ESA's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. It shows a full 360-degree view around Huygens. The left-hand side, behind Huygens, shows a boundary between light and dark areas. The white streaks seen near this boundary could be ground 'fog' of methane or ethane vapour, as they were not immediately visible from higher altitudes. As the probe descended, it drifted over a plateau (centre of image) and was heading towards its landing site in a dark area (right). This dark area is possibly a drainage channel which might still contain liquid material. From the drift of the probe, the wind speed has been estimated at around 6-7 metres per second. These images were taken from an altitude of about 8 kilometres with a resolution of about 20 metres per pixel.

[Answerer]

I hope they find life there. I wonder what is the "sea" made of?

Funny, shouldn't the "sea" be frozen? :confused: :confused:

[MrFurious76]

I think it was said the "liquid" is really liquid methane or some other substance that is a gas on earth.

So i'm doubting anything alive would be in it :)

[whichphilosophy]

I think it was said the "liquid" is really liquid methane or some other substance that is a gas on earth.

So i'm doubting anything alive would be in it :)

Who knows. In fact even back on earth we are finding life exists in places where we thought it was impossible.

For instance in the hot springs of Yellowstone Park USA or deep in the ocean beds and even in the desert, living organisms are pretty much everywhere.

Pity we could not send a longer lasting camera. Seems a shame to wait 15 years for a few hours of pictures, though they were pretty impressive.

[Jesse]

Pity we could not send a longer lasting camera. Seems a shame to wait 15 years for a few hours of pictures, though they were pretty impressive. Remember that we have only seen the first few pictures that the ESA has chosen to release (unlike NASA, they don't make the raw images available to the public), I think there were actually over 300 taken. And the ones we have seen probably haven't been fully processed, they may look sharper once they are, or when multiple images are combined into a single one.

In any case, unless the probe had a rover, more pictures probably wouldn't add that much once it had landed. And building a rover that would work at those temperatures might be difficult, not to mention it'd be a big gamble since they didn't know whether it would land on a solid surface.

[um3k]

Want more images? Look here: http://mars.lyle.org/titan/raw/

[Jesse]

You can also see a raw image gallery with thumbnails of each triplet here:

http://mars.lyle.org/titan/

The reason they are arranged in triplets is that Huygens had three cameras, the highest-resolution one pointing straight down, a lower-resolution one pointing down at a 45-degree angle, and the lowest-resolution one pointing sideways (unfortunately this means the picture from the surface probably isn't gonna get much clearer than what we've seen already, unless they can combine multiple low-res images of the same scene into a single high-res image during image processing). This page (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/test_images.htm) shows some samples of images from the same types of cameras during a field test on earth, they look clearer than the ones we've seen of Huygens' descent, hopefully they can improve them with image processing. For example:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/images/bashar/mosaic_2.jpg

Also, note that the color picture from the surface I posted earlier wasn't taken by a color camera, according to this page (http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_images_0115.html) they combined a black-and-white image with information from a visible-light spectrometer which had lower resolution than the camera but which could tell you the general color of different areas...the page above shows the same technique being used in the field test:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/images/bashar/mosaic_c_3.jpg

By dividing the spectra recorded by the downward-looking visible spectrometer (DLVS) into three color bins (Red, Green and Blue) and comparing their intensities with that of a bin covering the same spectral region as that of the DISR imagers (HRI, MRI and SLI), a fairly decent colorization was implemented. Possessing the relatively low spatial resolution of the DLVS (4 by 4 degrees) the coloring of the DISR imagers looks impressionistic, but succeeds in capturing the various large surface units of the images, including the grass, the concrete and the bricks.

[B_Sharp]

In the photos, has anyone seen any alien monuments yet?

Just asking ... unlikely but it could happen. :D

[Tubby Lardmore]

... I bet they'll have the same shrugged shoulder attitude to this...

On Friday I asked a co-worker if he had heard whether the Huygens descent had gone okay. He had no idea what I was talking about. He knew nothing of the Cassini/Huygens mission. And it's not like the guy is an artsy type who cares nothing about technology, since he has a degree in mechanical engineering.

There is no use of my tax dollars that pleases me to the degree that space exploration does.

[Artemus]

Yeah, but after the Beagle 2 triumph last year, that should fill us all with confidence!
http://linuxdevices.com/files/misc/beagle2_clamshell2_sm.jpg

ESA is now accepting blame for the loss of channel A data (with half the pictures and the wind Doppler data gone). Still, 50% of the channels worked, so they are getting better! :) Seriously, it will be interesting to see the sequence of events that led to the mistake. (Apparently the channel A receiver on Cassini was never turned on.)

[Jesse]

So according to the info released by ESA scientists in the latest press conference (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMHB881Y3E_0.html), they believe that those lakebeds and riverbeds are currently dry, although they periodically refill:

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_science-results_0121.html A week after Huygens' descent, the emerging picture of the surface of that smoggy world is of an arid, icy desert, where periodic storms of methane rain create transient rivers that wash sooty soil from icy highlands out to short-lived pools and lakes. The pools dry up -- perhaps sinking into a sandy soil of glass-like water ice -- and the Titanian desert waits for another methane storm.

The picture is strangely similar to the climate in Arizona, where Huygens' camera was built, a fact that was not lost on the camera's principal investigator, Martin Tomasko of the University of Arizona. "The region that we landed in is typical of arid regions on the Earth," he said in a press conference held in Paris this morning. "We see no evidence that there is any liquid in any of these features right now, but we see evidence of streams, rivers, and rainfall. There is lots of evidence for many familiar Earth-like processes, like rainfall, and erosion, but with very exotic materials on this new world."

Actually, the materials are quite familiar ones -- water, natural gas, and smog particles -- but under Titan's temperature conditions they behave in quite unfamiliar ways. Like the Arizona desert, the Huygens landing site has steep hills, arroyos or dry gullies choked with sediment, and dry flat valleys where liquid pools. But these features are made of very different materials on Titan. Where Arizona's hills are made of silicate rocks, Huygens' hills are made of "frozen hard water ice," Tomasko said. The hills are fairly steep, with heights varying some 100 meters (330 feet) over a span of a kilometer (0.6 mile), and they exert topographic control over the pattern of the drainage visible in the Huygens images.

The icy hills are much brighter than the flat plains, which are actually brighter than the bottoms of the drainage channels visible in the Huygens images. Tomasko proposed the following explanation for these differences in brightness. "We think it’s evidence of rain. Photochemical smog falls out of the atmosphere, and coats the whole terrain." When it rains, the smog particles coating the surface "get preferentially washed off the tops of the ridges, so there is a concentration of these organic [smog] materials in the bottoms of these channels." The plains, where the channels emptied, is floored by material that was eroded from the icy highlands; the surface is "sandy" and "rocky," but the sand isn't the silicate sand we Earthlings are used to, it is "crushed dirty ice." The dirty outwash from the channels emptied into these ice-sandy plains and sank in, according to Tomasko's explanation.

How often does this scenario play out on Titan's surface? Tomasko was careful to point out that Huygens was only one mission at one time at one spot on Titan, so "we don't have a long enough time series to know what is typical." It wasn't raining when Huygens descended, and it wasn't wet when she landed, but whether this is the usual state for Titan's surface is an open question, one that may take another, longer-lived, and even mobile Titan surface mission to answer. Let's hope another mission to Titan actually happens...the last paragraph of the article expands on this possibility: Indeed, the scientists are already looking ahead to possible future missions. The most important aspect of a future Titan mission, according to Huygens project scientist Jean-Pierre Lebreton, would be "mobility." The most effective way to do this on Titan is with "a floating machine," he said. (Titan, with its low gravity and thick but not too thick atmosphere, is the most flight-friendly body in the solar system.) But Lebreton laughed as he added that he had just had a phone call from the Mars Exploration Rover team, who "now are dreaming of sending their rovers on the surface of Titan. From what we have seen of the surface, this is now highly possible: we can dream of sending rovers on Titan." Perhaps Huygens' most lasting contribution to the study of Titan will be as a pathfinder, showing that sending a long-lived, mobile spacecradt to Titan's surface would be a worthwhile endeavor.

[Tubby Lardmore]

A rover on Titan would be splendid. Both of the Mars rovers did a great job. I wonder if a relatively simple modification of the Mars rovers would suffice for operating on Titan.

[Dargo]

A rover on Titan would be splendid. Both of the Mars rovers did a great job. I wonder if a relatively simple modification of the Mars rovers would suffice for operating on Titan.


The biggest problem would be the need for a politically difficult and rather expensive due to numerous regulations nuclear power source. Solar power is essentially useless in Saturn's orbit, and less than useless on the cloudy surface of Titan. I believe ESA has a current policy against any use of nuclear power on it's probes. Huygens was powered by batteries kept charged by Cassini's RTG prior to separation.

I'm not sure RTGs would even be feasible on a vehicle the size of the current Mars rovers. NASA does plan to use RTGS for future Mars rovers but these will be much larger than Spirit and Opportunity, and may be too heavy for launch to Saturn.

[_Naturalist_]

I have read that ESA might consider RTGs and nuclear technology in the future, simply because it will be necessary. As for launching heavy spacecrafts and probes to the outer planets, maybe it would be better to wait and develop more efficient propulsion systems that uses nuclear power for example.