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January 14, 2005
Spacecraft Lands On Saturn Moon

The European Space Agency's Huygens Probe, part of the Cassini-Huygens mission, landed on Titan at 7:45 ET this morning. Titan, one of Saturn's 33 known moons, is bigger than the Mercury and Pluto, and is one of the few moons in our solar system with its own atmosphere.

CNN reports that scientists from the European Space Agency are elated:
"We have a signal. We know that Huygens is alive meaning the dream is alive," said Jean-Jacques Dordain director general for ESA which designed Huygens. "This is already an engineering success and we will see, later this afternoon, if this is a scientific success."

A European Space Agency press release states that the signal "indicates that the back cover of Huygens must have been ejected, the main parachute must have been deployed and that the probe has begun to transmit, in other words, the probe is alive. This, however, still does not mean that any data have been acquired, nor that they have been received by Cassini."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a $3.3-billion joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's space program to study the Saturn system. The Cassini orbiter was built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Huygens probe was built by the European Space Agency. The Italian Space agency provided Cassini's high-gain communication antenna.

From California Yankee.

Posted by Dan Spencer at January 14, 2005 03:49 PM | TrackBack
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