RISKY? IT'S A MACHINE:

Huygens Probe Takes Plunge (John Johnson, December 25, 2004, LA Times)

The Frisbee-shaped Huygens probe successfully separated from the Cassini spacecraft Friday and began a risky 2.5-million-mile journey to the surface of Saturn's bizarre, smog-choked moon Titan.

Applause burst out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shortly after 7:24 p.m., when scientists received word from NASA's Deep Space Network tracking stations in Spain and Goldstone, Calif., that the Huygens probe had cast off after a seven-year piggyback ride on the Cassini spacecraft. All systems were said to have performed flawlessly in the separation.

"Today's release was another successful milestone in the Cassini-Huygens odyssey," said David Southwood of the European Space Agency, which built the Huygens probe. "Now all of our hopes and expectations are focused on getting the first [close-up] data from a new world we've been dreaming of exploring for decades."

That data won't come for another three weeks, during which time the 9-foot-diameter Huygens probe will chase down Titan and then, if everything goes as planned, hurl itself through the thick, nitrogen-methane atmosphere before crashing into a surface that could consist of anything from a sticky chemical sludge to poison oceans.

Titan has beguiled scientists for years because it is unlike any other place in the solar system. The only moon with an atmosphere, Titan is also of interest because it is thought to resemble the early Earth, before plant life formed and began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.

Too frigid at minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit to grow life itself, Titan is a kind of frozen museum piece of what an early, Earth-like planet might look like.

Were it not like Earth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 25, 2004 8:39 AM