First Views of Titan
The news feeds were confused during the midday and afternoon, most of them still carrying old news with minor text updates, but above was the first image of the surface of Titan, taken during its descent at an altitude of 16.2 kilometers with a resolution of approximately 40 meters per pixel. There's no information concerning what electromagnetic frequencies this represents (ie is this simply a grayscale image of what a normal digital photo would look like of the surface -- possible because the Huygens probe was designed to shine an intense spotlight at the moon's surface during the descent - or is this a spe
ctrally-shifted image taken using higher-energy radiation?) but I wanted to share it nonetheless. It's not every day we get to see the surface of another world for the first time. The image at the left is another aerial shot, at an altitude of 8 kilometers (approx. 5 miles), with a resolution of 20 meters per pixel.
Details in the arial photos are being seen as confirmation of substantial liquid (liquified gases, such as methane, of course, not water) flows and bodies on the surface.
Reports have indicated that the probe has not only survived the descent but has c
ontinued to function well beyond the anticipated few minutes operation and transmission once it reached Titan's surface. Initial indications are that it landed on a solid surface, as opposed to the possibility of it splashing down on a lake of liquid methane, were born out by later data. Here, seen over on the right, is a photograph taken on the surface of Titan. The probe designers and mission experts who've waited over seven years for this must be ecstatic that everything has gone so well.
The European Space Agency's site have been understandably swamped much of the day, especially in the afternoon as the first images were arriving -- the Huygens probe is their baby after all. That's already beginning to clear up, largely, I'm sure, due to news sites and blogs mirroring more of the content. Nasa's Saturn-focused section of their site has similarly been overwhelmed. While they've been putting more of an emphasis on the Cassini orbiter -- that being much more their piece of the project -- the JPL/NASA site is showcasing the same images, too
Some information on the probe itelf, from the path it was projected to take today to some details of its design and function can be found here, a pdf on the Huygens probe and Cassini orbiter is here, and finally a nice look at the Surface Science Package, one of the six experiments on board the probe.
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