Europe’s Huygens probe was quite alone when it set down on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, but two new videos based the landing allow viewers to hitch a ride aboard the spacecraft’s descent.
The videos give an up-close view of the European Space Agency’s Huygens Titan touchdown on Jan. 14, 2005, with one recording offering a probe’s-eye-view of the landing while the other includes more technical view.
“It was a very complicated process,” said Erich Karkoschka, a senior staff scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona who integrated the Huygens images into mosaics and videos. Putting the images together “to build mosaics and make it without any seams … that took quite a lot of time.”
Painstaking production
Huygens spent about 147 minutes descending through Titan’s atmosphere. During that time, the probe’s NASA-funded Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) photographed the moon’s orangish atmosphere and mottled, gullied surface from three separate angles.
Karkoschka compressed the 2.5-hour descent into the four-minute and 40-second video “View from Huygens,” adding some additional flourishes on the surface to portray additional findings – such as the methane signature detected by the ESA probe. Researchers believe the warm probe helped release the gas when it touched down on the cold moon’s surface.
Get the full Tariq Malik story and video feed of this exciting event in space exploration at SPACE.com.
