Today, Cassini-Huygens begins exploration of Saturn's moon Titan. Titan could only logically be called a moon when you consider that its next to Jupiter and Saturn. By itself, its larger than planets Mercury and Pluto. So its sort of like the way I'd be a center if I played on a basketball team at work, but in the NBA I'd be a (very) small forward. Well, and I'd be a bad forward at that, but that's not really the point I'm making.
Anyway, Titan is surrounded by dense orange clouds, made up primarily of nitrogen but also containing methane. Where does the methane come from? On Earth it comes from biomasses degrading or cows farting. Are there farting cows on Titan? That seems unlikely as average temperature is several hundred degrees below zero F.
Because of this cloud cover, though, we don't really know what's down there. There are some theories, but there has been very little observation of the surface. Is it icy mountains or vast seas of liquid methane? We don't know.
This should all change today, when the Huuygens probe (named after the Danish astronomer Christian Huygens who discovered Titan) enters into the atmosphere around Titan and begins its 2 and a half hour descent to the planets surface. Huuygens was carried to the moon by Cassini, another probe, which released Huuygens and sent it on its path to Titan several weeks ago.
NASA just announced that Huygens has in fact landed on Titan. But even at the speed of light it takes over an hour for Cassini to transmit the results. I'll update this as we learn more. But its an exciting mission that not a lot of people seem to know about and I wanted to bring it up and congratulate JPL on the work they've done.
UPDATE: It's official! Huygens has landed on Titan and is sending its data back to Cassini, which is then passing it on back to Earth. Students at radio telescopes in West Virginia and the Mojave desert have detected the signal from Huygens directly. From the pictures so far Titan looks .... dark. Well, the photos will get better as time goes on anyway.
Notes;
Here's some links on the project and the results
Cassini-Huuygens main page
Cassini Images
I'm just impressed that JPL was able to work successfully with Europeans, what with their fancy, inscrutible metric system and all. You think the accounting department remembered to convert the Dollars to Euros when paying for all this?
I'm surprised to see that the media haven't picked up on the barely averted disaster of this mission. Of course, I've only read one article on it today, so maybe somebody out there has published a story about it recently. Anyway, from the cover story I read about it in the IEEE Spectrum a couple months ago, here's how it goes. The original plan was to release the probe just as the mother ship passed over Titan, and the probe would beam back data to the mother ship as it speed on towards Saturn. But, it turns out the designers of the communication system of the mother ship neglected to account for the doppler shift that would occur due to the high relative velocity of the transmitter and receiver. Since the radio system design was contracted out, the design was proprietary, and no one at the european space agency (whatever it's called) or JPL had any way to know if the system would work without testing it. But, they didn't want to spend the money to test the system and they trusted that the radio designers wouldn't miss something as fundamental as doppler shift. So, the thing was launched, but a European radio engineer associated with the project still had a gut feeling that something was wrong and after months (or maybe years) of wrangling with his superiors, he finally was allowed to run a communication test with the probe in-flight. Turns out he was right, of course. So, they fixed the problem by launching the probe much earlier, so it would descent into Titans atmosphere just as the mother ship was passing by the moon and thus minimizing the relative velocity and doppler shift between the two vehicles. But for that one man, this would've been yet another spectacular failure of a space mission.