Movies of Titan from Huygens at Wolverine’s Den

Movies of Titan from Huygens

04May06

Now this is truly a significant press release, one which I’ve been ogling periodically all day. In January of 2005, the Huygens probe, ferried to the Saturnian system by the Cassini spacecraft, successfully landed on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Huygens’ stately arrival marked a huge scientific milestone, delivering invaluable imagery and data from beneath the veil of Titan’s foggy atmosphere, offering unprecedented glimpses of the enigmatic satellite’s terrain. The information returned from this endeavor will keep planetary scientists busy for years to come.

Movies have now been released of Huygens’ descent, compiled from imagery and data acquired by the probe’s DISR instrument (Descent Imager / Spectral Radiometer), and must have been amazingly labor-intensive to assemble. As Huygens’ head honcho Jean-Pierre Lebreton notes: “These movies really demonstrate that the Huygens camera was very well designed for the job. They show so many different details of a landscape that covers only a tiny fraction - one-thousandth - of Titan’s surface. This makes me dream of what a possible future mission to Titan may return of this wonderful and fascinating Earth-like world.”

Follow the links to get a bird’s-eye view of Titan from Huygens’ perspective — the movies cram two and a half hours of events into a clip just shy of five minutes. They’re very impressive, and well worth the download times in order to examine a distant world up-close. Dial-up users, though, should probably avoid trying to snatch the really large files I’ve linked from the DISR team. Enjoy!

Image credit: ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

New views of the most distant touchdown ever made by a spacecraft are being released today by NASA, the European Space Agency and the University of Arizona. The movies show the dramatic descent of the Huygens probe to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan on Jan. 14, 2005.

The movies were put together with data collected by the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer instrument during the probe’s 147-minute plunge through Titan’s thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed. The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer was funded by NASA.

The data were analyzed for months after the landing and represent the best visual product obtained from the Huygens mission. It is the most realistic way yet to experience the Huygens probe landing.

This movie, built with data collected during the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe on Jan. 14, 2005, shows the operation of the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera during its descent and after touchdown.