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NASA, Partners Release New Movies of Saturn Moon Titan

05 May 2006

Views of most distant touchdown ever made by a spacecraft

By Cheryl Pellerin
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington – NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Arizona released new views May 4 of the most distant touchdown ever made by a spacecraft.

The movies show the dramatic descent of the Huygens probe to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005, according to a NASA press release. View from Huygens on Jan. 14, 2005 provides 4 minutes and 40 seconds of what the probe actually "saw" during the 2.5 hours of the descent and touchdown.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan is a joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, the Italian space agency.

The movies were put together with data collected during the probe's 147-minute plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft, sandy riverbed. The data, which were analyzed for months after the landing, represent the best visual product obtained from the Huygens mission. It is the most realistic way yet to experience the Huygens probe landing.

"At first, the Huygens camera just saw fog over the distant surface," said movie creator Erich Karkoschka, team member at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"The fog started to clear only at about 60 kilometers altitude, making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 meters," he said. "But only after landing could the probe's camera resolve little grains of sand millions and millions of times smaller than Titan. A movie is a perfect medium to show such a huge change of scale."

For the second movie, scientists used artistic license and added sound to represent the different datasets collected.

"These movies really demonstrate that the Huygens camera was very well designed for the job," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Huygens project scientist and mission manager at ESA.

"They show so many different details of a landscape that covers only a tiny fraction – one-thousandth – of Titan's surface,” he added. “This makes me dream of what a possible future mission to Titan may return of this wonderful and fascinating Earth-like world."

The Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Titan in July 2004, delivered the Huygens probe to Titan. The spacecraft continues to orbit Saturn in the second year of its four-year tour. Cassini will make 22 flybys of Titan this year, with 45 total flybys scheduled in the full tour. Its next Titan flyby is May 20.

The new movies and images are available at the NASA Web site, as is the full text of the press release.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)