News | January 13, 2015

NASA and ESA Celebrate 10 Years Since Titan Landing

Preston Dyches
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-7013
preston.dyches@jpl.nasa.gov

Ten years ago, an explorer from Earth parachuted into the haze of an alien moon toward an uncertain fate. After a gentle descent lasting more than two hours, it landed with a thud on a frigid floodplain, surrounded by icy cobblestones. With this feat, the Huygens probe accomplished humanity's first landing on a moon in the outer solar system. Huygens was safely on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

Approaching Titan A Billion Times Closer — Drop into Titan with Huygens in this video made using data from Cassini and ESA's historic mission.

The hardy probe not only survived the descent and landing, but continued to transmit data for more than an hour on the frigid surface of Titan, until its batteries were drained.

Since that historic moment, scientists from around the world have pored over volumes of data about Titan, sent to Earth by Huygens -- a project of the European Space Agency -- and its mothership, NASA's Cassini spacecraft. In the past 10 years, data from the dynamic spacecraft duo have revealed many details of a surprisingly Earth-like world.

In addition to the technical wizardry needed to pull off this tour de force, international partnerships were critical to successfully delivering the two spacecraft to Saturn and Titan.

"A mission of this ambitious scale represents a triumph in international collaboration,” said Earl Maize, Cassini Project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"From the mission's formal beginning in 1982, to Huygens' spectacular landing 23 years later, to the present day, Cassini-Huygens owes much of its success to the tremendous synergy and cooperation between more than a dozen countries. This teamwork is still a major strength of the project as the Cassini orbiter continues to explore the Saturn system," Maize said.

A collection of Huygens' top findings is available from the European Space Agency at:
http://sci.esa.int/huygens-titan-science-highlights

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. NASA supplied two instruments on the probe, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer and the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer.

More information about Cassini is available at the following sites:
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

"10 Years of Unveiling Titan" written by Courtney O'Connor

Science Summary: 10 Years of Unveiling Titan

Lakes and Seas
itan has been revealed to be a world with lakes and seas, made up of liquid methane and ethane. It is believed that these bodies of hydrocarbons are replenished by methane and ethane rainfall from clouds in the moon's atmosphere. Titan is the only other place in the solar system known to have an Earth-like cycle of liquids flowing across its surface.

Active Meteorology and Surface Processes
Liquid methane drizzles onto Titan's surface. Just like clouds on Earth, clouds on Titan form through a cycle of evaporation and condensation, with methane vapor rising from the surface, forming clouds and falling back down as precipitation. Titan’s "hydrological" cycle causes visible changes on the moon’s surface.

Organic Sand Seas
Seas of sand dunes, like those in Earth's Arabian desert, are observed in the dark equatorial regions of Titan. Scientists believe the sand is not made of silicates as on Earth, but of solid water ice coated with hydrocarbons that fall from the atmosphere. Images show Titan's dunes are gigantic, reaching on average 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers) wide, hundreds of miles (kilometers) long and around 300 feet (100 meters) high.

First Determination of Depth for an Extraterrestrial Sea
Ligeia Mare, Titan’s second-largest sea, was revealed to be about 560 feet (170 meters) deep. This represents the first time scientists have been able to determine the depth of a body of open liquid on the surface of another world. This was possible, in part, because the liquid turned out to be mostly clear methane, allowing the radar signal to pass through it easily.

River Channels and Ice Cobbles
Images taken during the Huygens probe descent revealed river channels and flood plains. Earth-like river rocks, composed of water ice, were also observed at the Huygens probe landing site. Radar evidence suggests that flash flooding has sculpted streambeds on Titan with these rounded cobbles of water ice, which are likely to have originated in water-ice bedrock in higher terrain.