January 14, 2005

Huygens (spacecraft)

ESA's Huygens probe lands on Titan

A communications configuration error cost the mission nearly half its planned pictures: 376 images arrived instead of roughly 700.

11:38:11 UTC, 14 January 2005

Huygens entered Titan's atmosphere at 09:05:56 UTC on 14 January 2005 and descended by parachute for about 147 minutes, transmitting atmospheric measurements and images to the Cassini orbiter. It touched down at 11:38:11 UTC at 10.25° south, 192.32° west, moving at 4.54 metres per second.

This was humanity's first successful landing on a world in the outer Solar System, and it remains the most distant landing from Earth. The first relayed scientific data reached ESA's operations centre in Darmstadt at 17:19 CET that afternoon.

Loose damp sand, not an ocean

The probe carried instruments capable of determining whether it had settled on solid ground or splashed into liquid. It landed on solid terrain with the consistency of loose, damp sand.

Surface temperature measured 93.65 ± 0.25 K, about −179.5 °C, at a pressure of 1,467 ± 1 hPa. At that temperature the rounded "rocks" in Huygens's photographs were probably water ice, frozen hard enough to behave like stone.

Seventy-two minutes of relay

Cassini received Huygens data from the surface for 72 minutes, until the orbiter passed below the landing site's horizon. A communications configuration error had already cost nearly half the planned images — 376 returned instead of roughly 700.

Earth-based radio telescopes went on detecting the probe's carrier signal for more than three additional hours. But the orbiter's relay window had closed, so no further Huygens science data could be recovered.

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