Good luck Huygens

[den]

LA CANADA, Calif. (Reuters) - A European-designed space probe broke away from its NASA mothership on Friday on a plunge toward the mysterious Saturn moon Titan, starting a journey researchers hope will end with answers about one of the most puzzling bodies in the solar system. Yahoo

The Huygens probe has been released and is heading for Saturn's largest moon, Titan, scientists have confirmed. BBC

Comments

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

(nods) I wish them luck... especially since the original Huygens design was an evolution of our Galileo probe ;).

[tephra]

*mutters something about rotational matrices, -y, -z, Galileo, Voyager (Voyager!) and Cassini*

Wonder how my contribution to CASPER* worked out....

*CAssini Sequence PlannER ... I didn't have any say in naming it.

[shigeru.livejournal.com]

Studying Titan? Pffft, it's been done...

Seriously, though, it'll be nice to get definite answers on what the hell the dark splotches in the infrared are all over the surface. I should probably be paying more attention to all this, but you know how planetary scientists can just keep droning on about boring stuff...I guess it's to compensate for the fact that they don't get to do fun stuff like us astronomers.

[arcturax.livejournal.com]

Ohh yeah, this is going to be so amazing!

Especially given the current pictures taken by Cassini so far using radar and infrared. That dark area looks very very enticingly like a sea with a long coastline and islands. If they find evidence that is what is really is, I think there will be more landers in the future for Titan.