This short animation is made up from a sequence of images taken by the
Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) instrument on board ESA's
Huygens probe, during its successful descent to Titan on Jan. 14, 2005.
It shows what a passenger riding on Huygens would have seen. The sequence
starts from an altitude of 152 kilometers (about 95 miles) and initially
only shows a hazy view looking into thick cloud. As the probe descends,
ground features can be discerned and Huygens emerges from the clouds at
around 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) altitude. The ground features seem
to rotate as Huygens spins slowly under
its parachute.
The DISR consists of a downward-looking High Resolution Imager (HRI), a
Medium Resolution Imager (MRI), which looks out at an angle, and a Side
Looking Imager (SLI). For this animation, most images used were captured
by the HRI and MRI. Once on the ground, the final landing scene was
captured by the SLI.
The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer is one of two NASA instruments on
the probe.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Descent
Imager/Spectral team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For more information about the Descent
Imager/Spectral Radiometer visit http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/.
