Far & Away
The Cassini-Huygens mission -- an international robotic probe mission focusing on Saturn and its moons -- is in the final hours of its seven-year journey through space. If you go the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's mission tracking site you can see the latest. The European-built Huygens probe detatched from the Cassini orbiter back on December 24th and will soon be descending into the misty atmosphere of Titan, the most chemically interesting of Saturn's moons. That it has an atmosphere alone gives it an edge of interest over its brethren. The probe will drop through the atmopshere, sending back images in a wide stretch of electromagetic spectra, and with a special microphone that's embedded in the probe the sound of its passage through the atmosphere will hopefully be captured, too. The probe will impact with such surface as Titan has -- it could very well be a slush composed of frozen gases in lakes of liquid methane -- and continue to take readings and send back data for perhaps as long as thirty minutes. During the process the data stream will be channeled up to the Cassini orbiter and from there relayed to Earth. Here's a more step-by-step view of the process planned for Friday's descent towards Titan.
Also, don't forget that we still have robotic probes wandering the surface of Mars. Winter distances from the sun and some dust storms have combined to give the Spirit and Opportunity rovers less power to operate on, but they continue to perform far beyond their original mission lives.
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