Space Topics: Saturn
The Year in Pictures: 2005
Huygens Finds a Coastal Plain on Titan
Credit: ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona / René Pascal |
January 14: The
world watched as the European Space Agency's tiny Huygens probe
descended to the surface of Saturn's
moon Titan on January 14 -- the first
landing on any body in the outer solar system. The
images that Huygens returned to Earth were unexpectedly familiar, showing what appeared to be
a coastline cut by dendritic, dark-floored channels, like rivers on Earth. But
these were no typical rivers -- although they now appear dry, they were probably
originally cut by flowing liquid methane into a solid surface made of water
ice.
The dramatic, 5-hour
Huygens mission to Titan was both blessed with
good luck and plagued by bad luck. The good luck included a landing path
that fortuitously crossed both of the major types of terrain (bright and dark)
that occur on Titan, and a gentle landing on a flat surface that permitted
it to survive for hours longer than expected. The bad luck included
an unexpectedly turbulent and hazy descent that frustrated the imaging team's
ability to determine the orientations of their images, as well as the loss
of data from Huygens' Doppler Wind Experiment due to human error. Good luck
saved the day, as recently-developed
technology enabled radio astronomers on Earth to salvage the experiment. In
the end, Huygens has provided a unique viewpoint on Titan that will not likely
be matched for decades but which will hopefully facilitate future exploration
of Titan's surface by other probes, landers, or flying machines.
This
particular view of a coastal plain on Titan was produced by an enthusiast,
René Pascal,
from the raw
images from Huygens that were available on the Web within 24 hours
of the probe's landing.
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