Huygens Landing Site

Huygen's view of Titan
November 30, 2005
PIA NumberPIA06437
Language
  • english

This composite image shows a mosaic of the European Space Agency's Huygens probe landing site, as seen by the descent imager/spectral radiometer on the Huygens probe. The mosaic is overlaid on a Cassini orbiter radar image. The radar image was taken on an Oct. 28, 2005, flyby. The landing site, marked by the red "X", is located at 192.3 degrees west, 10.3 degrees south (southern hemisphere of Titan).

Identifying the landing site will improve the understanding of Titan to be gained by comparing localized data that the probe returned with larger-scale observations by the orbiter.

The Huygens probe was delivered to Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft, which is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. NASA supplied two instruments on the probe, the descent imager/spectral radiometer and the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/USGS