From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Mon Jan 17 2005 - 22:08:40 PST
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan05/Huygens.landing.deb.html Excitement and puzzlement as Cornell views first Titan images
by Larry Klaes
At 2:55 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 14, the first image of the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, taken by the Cassini-Huygens space probe, was shown to the world. Taken from an altitude of 10 miles as the saucer-shaped Huygens probe parachuted through the murky orange atmosphere, the raw, unprocessed image showed what appeared to be drainage channels flowing into a dark, featureless region.
"This high-altitude photo looks a lot like the runoff channels we have seen on Mars," offered astronomy graduate student Britt Scharringhausen.
The comments amid the frissons of excitement as new images from above Titan and then on its surface came up on the screen via NASA-TV lasted for much of the day as members of the campus community and the general public who crowded into the building--courtesy of the Department of Astronomy and Rick Kline, SPIF's data manager--shared the rare experience of seeing a totally alien world for the first time through the electronic eyes and instruments of Huygens.
The open house, which had been widely publicized, brought parents and children, students, faculty and even President Jeffrey Lehman to witness the historic unveiling of images from Titan. Also occasionally present, and inevitably bombarded with questions, were some Cornell members of the science team for the Cassini spacecraft, which went into a Saturn orbit on June 30, 2004. Team members include Joseph Burns, the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, professor of astronomy and Cornell's vice provost for physical sciences and engineering; Joseph Veverka, professor and chair of the Department of Astronomy; astronomy professors Steve Squyres, Peter Gierasch and Philip Nicholson; and Peter Thomas, senior researcher in astronomy.
Cornell's contributions to the Cassini mission are the two main cameras that take wide and narrow angles of Saturn and its rings and moons, and the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS), which measures the thermal radiation of the object being examined.
During the morning, the European Space Agency (ESA), which is largely responsible for the Huygens probe, officially announced that the 700-pound vehicle had successfully landed on the moon's bitterly cold surface. Huygens then returned data for nearly two hours from the ground via the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, much longer than the three to 30 minutes originally anticipated. The images traveled across 750 million miles of interplanetary space in more than an hour to reach eager scientists on Earth.
The first image from Titan's surface, a black-and-white picture showing rounded ice boulders extending across a relatively flat surface to the horizon, surprised some Cornell watchers. "Titan's surface seems to have similar qualities to what we have seen on the surface of Mars," suggested Justin Wick, a Cornell graduate student who wrote the software for the mission planning lists of another space mission with Cornell involvement, the Mars rover mission. Researcher Burns later noted that the Huygens images gave further evidence that Titan has a "totally bizarre landscape. Titan's surface is made up of totally different materials in a very dense atmosphere. The surface appears mundane, but it is actually spectacular."
As more images of Titan were scheduled to be shown at 5 p.m., the open house crowd became so large that the presentation was moved to a larger room on the first floor, which quickly filled up.
"This is a testament to the ability of people around the world to join together in a collaborative venture," said Lehman after seeing the images. "It opens an entirely new window of scientific understanding into the nature of the universe that we all share."
Matt Hedman, a post doctoral researcher who has been working with Burns on the images from Cassini, summed up in two words what most people were thinking about the images from Titan: "Happily confused."
More information on the the landing is at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=530
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: Mon Jan 17 2005 - 22:22:48 PST
"Mudslides!" was among the verbal reactions from those present in the third-floor Spacecraft Imaging Facility (SPIF) conference room in the Space Sciences Building. Indeed, it was hard not to imagine that the scene depicted rivers flowing into a large body of liquid, complete with shoreline and nearby islands.