p2pnet.net OT News:- The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe is slated to detach from the Cassini Orbiter today, marking Phase II in a fascinating seven-year, two-billion-mile, space adventure.

In 1997, the mission launched robot spacecraft equipped with 12 scientific experiments to orbit Saturn, the second largest planet in the solar system, for a four-year period..

Today, the Huygens probe will finally be released on a path toward Titan. Once freed from Cassini, it’ll remain dormant until the onboard timer wakes it up shortly before it reaches Titan’s upper atmosphere on January 14.

Scientists hope the bitterly cold moon will hold clues as to how Earth came to bear life.

Titan has a thick, Earth-like nitrogen-based atmosphere and a surface some scientists believe features chilled lakes of ethane and methane. And they’d like to know where the methane came from.

They also think the moon’s surface, covered by a thick, smog-like orange haze of possible naturally occurring hydrocarbon particles, could be coated with the residue of a sticky, brown organic rain.

Data gathered during the two-and-a-half hour fall will be transmitted from the probe to the Cassini orbiter. Then, Cassini will point its antenna at Earth and relay the data through NASA’s Deep Space Network to JPL and on to ESA’s Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, the operations center for the mission.

Updates on the Huygens probe release will be available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 24th, 2004 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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