First image from Titan

Friday 14 January 2005

The first image from the Huygens probe on Titan shows the surface of the moon of Saturn:

First image of Titan

Some remarkable factoids about the mission:

  • Although it is a moon, Titan is larger than Pluto, and has lakes of liquid methane (we seem to be seeing one in the picture).
  • It took seven years for the probe to travel from Earth to Titan.
  • Because not enough sun is available to power cells, the probe is powered by batteries, which were only designed to last a few minutes.
  • The batteries lasted a few hours anyway!

Comments

[gravatar]
andrew 6:15 PM on 15 Jan 2005
And the most amazing thing about Huygens is that it is an ESA (European Space Agency) probe and not a NASA probe. I would have bet hard money that the Europeans couldn't hit the ocean from the beach with that thing.

The mighty EU white flag is flying over Titan. Unconditional surrender again.

Add a comment:

Ignore this:
Leave this empty:
Name is required. Either email or web are required. Email won't be displayed and I won't spam you. Your web site won't be indexed by search engines.
Don't put anything here:
Leave this empty:
Comment text is Markdown.