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Building our new view of Titan (Forwarded)



 
 
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Old June 1st 07, 05:35 PM posted to sci.astro
Andrew Yee
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Default Building our new view of Titan (Forwarded)

ESA News
http://www.esa.int

1 June 2007

Building our new view of Titan

Today, two and a half years after the historic landing of ESA's Huygens
probe on Titan, a new set of results on Saturn's largest moon is ready to
be presented. Titan, as seen through the eyes of Huygens still holds
exciting surprises, scientists say.

On 14 January 2005, after a seven-year voyage on board the NASA/ESA/ASI
Cassini spacecraft, ESA's Huygens probe spent 2 hours and 28 minutes
descending by parachute to land on Titan. It then sent transmissions from
the surface for another seventy minutes before Cassini moved out of range.

On 8 December that year, a combined force of scientists published their
preliminary findings in Nature. Now, after another year and a half of
patient work, they are ready to add fresh details to their picture of
Titan. This time, the papers are published in a special issue of the
Planetary and Space Science magazine.

"The added value comes from computer modelling," says Jonathan Lunine,
Huygens Interdisciplinary Scientist from the Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory, University of Arizona.

By driving their computer models of Titan to match the data returned from
the probe, planetary scientists can now visualise Titan as a working
world. "Even though we have only four hours of data, it is so rich that
after two years of work we have yet to retrieve all the information it
contains," says François Raulin, Huygens Interdisciplinary Scientist, at
the Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l'Environnement, Paris.

The new details add greatly to the picture of Saturn's largest moon.
"Titan is a world very similar to the Earth in many respects," says
Jean-Pierre Lebreton, ESA Huygens Project Scientist.

Huygens found that the atmosphere was hazier than expected because of the
presence of dust particles -- called 'aerosols'. Now, scientists are
learning how to interpret their analysis of these aerosols, thanks to a
special chamber that simulates Titan's atmosphere.

When the probe dropped below 40 kilometres in altitude, the haze cleared
and the cameras were able to take their first distinct images of the
surface. They revealed an extraordinary landscape showing strong evidence
that a liquid, possibly methane, has flowed on the surface, causing
erosion. Now, images from Cassini are being coupled with the 'ground
truth' from Huygens to investigate how conditions on Titan carved out this
landscape.

As the probe descended, Titan's winds carried it over the surface. A new
model of the atmosphere, based on the winds, reveals that Titan's
atmosphere is a giant conveyor belt, circulating its gas from the south
pole to the north pole and back again.

Also, the tentative detection of an extremely low frequency (ELF) radio
wave has planetary scientists equally excited. If they confirm that it is
a natural phenomenon, it will give them a way to probe into the moon's
subsurface, perhaps revealing an underground ocean.

The journey Huygens took to the surface is the subject of the most intense
scrutiny, with many papers on the subject. When an anomaly onboard Cassini
robbed scientists of data from the Doppler Wind Experiment (DWE), it was
followed by a painstaking analysis of data collected by radio telescopes
on Earth that were tracking Huygens. Engineers and scientists succeeded in
recovering the movement of the probe, providing an accurate wind profile
and helping them place some of the images and data from Huygens into their
correct context.

Now corroborating evidence, resulting from a thorough analysis of many
instruments and engineering sensors on Huygens, is adding unprecedented
detail to the movement of the probe during its descent.

And there is still more science to come. "There are so many papers dealing
with the results from Huygens that we could not prepare all of them in
time for this issue. So a second special issue is already in preparation,"
says Raulin.

Notes for editors

This article is an introduction to the series of results to appear in a
special issue of the Planetary and Space Science magazine dedicated to
results from Huygens. It is based on the paper: 'A new image of Titan *
preface to the PPS Special Issue: 'Titan as seen from Huygens'', by F.
Raulin, M.C. Gazeau and J.P. Lebreton.

Cassini-Huygens is a joint mission between NASA, ESA and the Italian Space
Agency (ASI).

For more information

Jean-Pierre Lebreton, ESA Huygens Project Scientist
Email: Jean.Pierre.Lebreton @ esa.int

Jonathan Lunine, Huygens Interdisciplinary Scientist, Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory, University of Arizona, USA
Email: Jlunine @ lpl.arizona.edu

Ralph Raulin, Huygens Interdisciplinary Scientist, Laboratoire de Physique
et Chimie de l'Environnement, Paris, France
Email: Raulin @ lisa.univ-paris12.fr

[NOTE: Images and weblinks supporting this release are available at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-...ME9RR1F_1.html ]


 




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