2007-06-06 | SCIENCE
Building Titan

Two and a half years after the historic landing of ESA's Huygens probe on Titan, a new set of results on Saturn's largest moon is ready to be presented. Titan, as seen through the eyes of the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, still holds exciting surprises, scientists say. The results are presented in a special edition of Planetary and Space Science Journal and at a press conference held June 1st in Athens.

On 14 January 2005, after a seven-year voyage on board the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft, ESA's Huygens probe spent 2 hours and 28 minutes descending by parachute to land on Titan. It then sent transmissions from the surface for another seventy minutes before Cassini moved out of range.

Professor John Zarnecki of The Open University led the Surface Science Package (SSP) on Huygens "Huygens has provided us with a rich seam of data to mine - and we shall be digging through it for some time to come. The Surface Science Package returned immediate information about Titan about the landing Huygens made but it is also a part of the longer term picture, piecing together the whole environment on Titan."

UK participation in the Cassini-Huygens mission was funded by the Science and technology Facilities Council.

By driving their computer models of Titan to match the data returned from the probe, planetary scientists can now visualize Titan as a working world. "Even though we have only four hours of data, it is so rich that after two years of work we have yet to retrieve all the information it contains," says François Raulin, Huygens Interdisciplinary Scientist, at the Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l'Environnement, Paris.

The preceding news links are provided as a public service for interested users. The views and claims expressed in external internet sites are not necessarily those of NASA.