European Craft Makes Safe, Soft Landing on Saturn Moon

[Zhukov]

European Craft Makes Safe, Soft Landing on Saturn Moon
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: January 14, 2005


DARMSTADT, Germany, Jan. 14 - A European spacecraft landed safely today on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, scientists here said.

Mission controllers said they were confident the Huygens craft made a soft landing by parachute because it was still transmitting signals long after its scheduled touchdown at about 1:30 p.m. (8:30 a.m. Eastern time).

"We know it has landed based on the laws of gravity," the European Space Agency's science director, David Southwood, said.

"It simply cannot still be flying. It's got to be on a solid surface, and it must be soft."

It is the first landing of a spacecraft on the moon of another planet. And Titan is no ordinary moon, but a body larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto, and almost the size of Mars.

The first data from Huygens is not expected until at least early this afternoon Eastern time, and pictures not until much later.

Even on Titan's surface, the craft's batteries will be running low - time enough for no more than 30 minutes to 2 hours of observations and picture-taking.

On Thursday Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the mission manager at the European Space Operations Center here, said, "I'm quite confident we will have something special."

At a news briefing Thursday, Dr. Martin G. Tomasko of the University of Arizona, a Huygens scientist, said the craft's camera and science instruments were expected to provide "a spectacularly new view of Titan and an understanding of this mysterious world."

Scientists were hoping to get their first peek inside one of the most intriguing atmospheres in the solar system.

Its dense hydrocarbon smog suggests complex chemical processes like those that led to life on Earth. Dr. Tomasko said previous observations indicated that the atmosphere would appear green at higher altitudes and then turn orange closer to the surface.

This atmosphere has also been frustrating. The perpetual smoggy veil has limited any view of Titan's surface to little more than a vague patchwork of light and dark regions, with only some hints of rugged topography.

The mission by the 700-pound Huygens, built and operated by the European Space Agency, is part of a $3.2 billion undertaking by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ESA and the Italian Space Agency.

Huygens (named for the 17th-century Dutch astronomer) rode piggyback on NASA's six-ton Cassini spacecraft for the seven-year journey to the wide-ranging orbit of Saturn. On the night of Dec. 24-25, Cassini released its fellow traveler for its solo cruise on course for Titan and is now in a position to relay all the data sent from Huygens during the descent and landing.

The possibility remains that a design flaw in Cassini's radio receiver system will hopelessly scramble the data. Engineers anticipated that signals from the wind-tossed Huygens would vary widely in frequency and strength, and thus compensated for it in the receiver's design. But they had failed to take into account frequency shifts that would also throw off the timing of the encoded data, leaving it a garbled mess.

In early 2000, an ESA engineer recognized the problem. Finally, ESA and NASA engineers found a way to reduce the frequency shifts to acceptable levels by altering the trajectory and orientation of Cassini during the critical maneuvers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/science/14cnd-titan.html?oref=login

 

[dilloduck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/science/14cnd-titan.html?oref=login

This is cool !!! Hope we get some good info and pics !!!