January 13, 2005

Get ready for two of the strangest hours in the history of space exploration. On Jan 14, the Huygens probe will parachute through the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon, Titan.

Descending through thick orange clouds, Huygens will taste Titan’s atmosphere, measure its wind and rain, listen for alien sounds and, when the clouds part, start taking pictures. No one knows what the photos will reveal.

posted by stomper 19 years ago
  • The funny picture of the sun in the 2nd link is from spaceweather.com
  • ps: please be kind. it's my first fpp.
  • cool post, stomper! your spaceweather link was a bit munged, so I've relinked: Spaceweather.com link to what I presume is the referenced picture of the sun--animated gif
  • Oh boy I am excited about this. Here's a schedule if you want to watch the webcast.
  • dammit, you beat me to it!....i've been waiting 7 years for this! i'm gonna stay up all night watching the webcast in my 'cassini launch team' tshirt...totally, freakin, geekin. yayyyyy! FINALLY, something to make you feel good about about being in this species.....
  • That's no moon ... that's a space station.
  • The FPP led me to believe I was opening a link concerning "Solaris," starring George Clooney.
  • Really super exciting. I had no idea this was coming up so soon - thanks, stomper! Whoo!
  • Awesome. Great first link, stomper, and welcome. I heard recently on NPR that they're going to crash a probe into a comet soon, too.
  • It is a great post, and it is very exciting. But, stomper, I believe you meant Saturn, not Jupiter.
  • I heard recently on NPR that they're going to crash a probe into a comet soon, too. Allow me to be the first to say I think this is a spectacularly bad idea.
  • Holy crap, I'd forgotten about that movie. Strange, given that I watched it about fifty times on cable when I was a kid. /derail
  • Man I hope the landing goes smoothly. This is just so cool. Pictures and sounds from another world? Thinking about it makes me all tingly inside.
  • But, stomper, I believe you meant Saturn, not Jupiter. erm... yes, yes I did. oops! ;*) and thanks for the link to the webcast, shinything!
  • imagine if we land on the head of the president of freaking Titan, and he declares intergalactic frozen war on earth... that would like totally suck.
  • If they won`t even let us see boobies on tv, do you think they are really going to allow us to see what`s under those clouds?,, (Momma should I trust the government?)
  • So long as there are no alien boobies, I expect we'll get to see.
  • Screw Jupiter. I want boobies on TV.
  • I'm staying up all night watching this too. And great FPP, stomper.
  • I'm watching NASA TV right now. Marvellously hypnotic stuff.
  • Thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten exactly when this was going to happen!
  • I promise never to make fun on anyone named Smeds again. Well, maybe just a little fun.
  • I went Dish, rather than Direct, for the sole reason that Dish had NASA-TV, right before the Columbia accident. I envisioned spending countless hours watching shuttle missions, but that failed to be. This new reason to watch NASA-TV makes me very happy. Forgive me, I've been wrestling my newly networked (home) Win98 box into submission for 6 hours after a hard day at hellwork and I am tres grumpy.
  • Wow, Freen. This should help convince the remaining skeptics in my dept of the value of unit testing and mock objects.
  • What the fuck is going on with the mission? I woke up excited to see what happened. The websites just say "it landed", and NASA TV has just been showing people milling around for an hour. Where are the updates?
  • The signals would only have started to arrive back here about five minutes ago (about 16.15 UTC, or three minuts after your post).
  • Funny Mefi is calling it 'Obligatory NASA post', the people I'm watching now are very much ESA. And very proud of it, too.
  • ??
  • Ah, ok, just saw the press conference at ESA when NASA TV finally came out of its "surveillance camera" mode. Although at the risk of sounding even more jaded, I turned it off after 20 minutes out of boredom and not hearing anything interesting.
  • Herchhhens.
  • Looks like the ESA gang aren't as up-to-speed as the NASA/JPL gang was when the Mars rovers landed. Before they went through any scrubbing, before hardly anyone even at JPL saw them, they were posting them up on the screens for everyone. The photos are there, and they've probably downloaded a bunch by now. Just seems the ESA is a little less prone to satisfying our (and especially my) need for immediate photo gratification. Heck, NASA's been doing the "soon as we get 'em, we'll show 'em, even if it takes a while to put the pretty ones together" since, from what I can remember, Voyager.
  • Sounds from Titan Audio data collected by the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI) 1) Descent through Titan's atmosphere. 2) Radar echoes.. to speculate about the nature of the surface