DARMSTADT, Germany – Europe’s Huygens probe parachuted 789 miles to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan Friday, ending one of space exploration’s most dramatic missions by collecting the first close-up photographs of the bleak, icy world.
One of the black-and-white images, taken from an altitude of 10 miles, showed what appeared to be glacierlike slush. Another, taken after landing, showed boulders and scree reminiscent of the pictures taken last year by NASA’s Mars rovers. A third revealed what looked like mountain crags.
“I am just delighted,” said David Southwood, science chief of the European Space Agency. “I wanted to know that this (mission) was going to produce unprecedented science, and it has. It’s the end of a wonderful day.”
Huygens’ arrival on Titan, 900 million miles away, marked the longest distance from Earth that a human-made spacecraft has ever traveled to make a landing, and the near-perfect journey put a new exclamation point on the four-year, $3.3 billion mission to explore Saturn, its rings and seven of its 31 known moons.
Titan holds a particular fascination for scientists. Not only is it the only moon in the solar system known to have a significant atmosphere – about 1 1/2 times as dense as Earth’s -it is also regarded as pre-biotic, with characteristics that Earth probably possessed before life evolved.
Those include an atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen, and the presence of water ice and hydrocarbons – building blocks of life. Because of its 900-million-mile distance from the sun, however, Titan is condemned to be frozen.
Until Friday, Titan frustrated all efforts to get a clear peek at its surface. Methane in the atmosphere reacts in the sun’s light to wrap the moon in a permanent blanket of smog – green at higher altitudes, probably orange on the ground. Huygens was designed to breach the shroud.
The probe smacked into Titan’s smoggy atmosphere at 8:13 a.m. PST and used three parachutes in a two-hour, 27-minute trip to the surface, analyzing the atmosphere, measuring the wind and checking for lightning before transmitting the data to the Cassini mother ship.
The 705-pound Huygens probe was launched in 1997 aboard Cassini, a joint NASA, ESA and Italian Space Agency mission to the solar system’s sixth planet. Cassini is designed to explore Saturn’s neighborhood for four years, but could go on far longer, until it runs out of fuel or its 12 instruments wear out.
European Space Agency
An image from the Huygens space probe apparently shows drainage channels leading to a shoreline on Saturn’s moon Titan. The image was one of the first beamed to Earth during the probe’s descent.
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