Click on the image for QuickTime Movie of
A View from Huygens - Jan. 14, 2005
This movie was built with data collected during the 147-minute plunge
through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed by
the European Space Agency's Huygens Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer on
Jan. 14, 2005,
In 4 minutes and 40 seconds, the movie shows what the probe "saw" within
the few hours of the descent and the landing. On approach, Titan appeared
as just a little disk in the sky among the stars, but after landing, the
probe's camera resolved little grains of sand millions of times smaller
than Titan.
At first, the Huygens camera just saw fog over the distant surface. The
fog started to clear only at about 60 kilometers (37 miles) altitude,
making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 meters
(328 feet). Only after landing could the probe's camera resolve the little
grains of sand. The movie provides a glimpse of such a huge change of
scale.
A music-only version of the video is available at
http://photojournal/archive/PIA08118_m.mov.
The Huygens probe was delivered to Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini
spacecraft, which is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. NASA supplied two instruments on the probe, the descent
imager/spectral radiometer and the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.
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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
descent imager/spectral radiometer team is based at the University of
Arizona, Tucson.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm
