My apologies for violating my usual rule of sending e-mails only on rare occasions, but this is just too exciting for anyone to miss: The Huygens probe landed successfully on Titan this morning!
Check out the “raw images” already posted at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html. Scientists are only just beginning to try to understand what we are seeing, and better pictures will be available soon as image processing techniques are applied. Nevertheless…
- The surface photo shows what appears to be chunks of ice strewn around (remember that the temperature is 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). If you’re not sufficiently impressed, remember that you are looking at the surface of a world that is nearly a billion miles away.
- Even more intriguing, look at the photo taken during descent. To get a sense of what you are looking at, imagine you are looking at the surface from a high-flying airplane. What does it look like to you? Sure looks to me like river/creek beds and possibly a lake over on the right.. I can hardly wait to hear what the experts say…
What to watch for in coming days and weeks: The Huygens probe had a short battery life, so all the data has been collected and transmitted. Now it’s a matter of processing all the data and interpreting it. The probe’s couple hours of operation on Titan will probably keep many scientists busy for years to come…
Jeff