Science is Cool: Huygens
Over the weekend, a probe called Huygens, landed a moon of Saturn called Titan. It has sent back some fascinating pictures. You can check out a few here.
William Saletan in Slate invokes a fitting sense of wonder at the accompolishment. My favorite quotes:
Actually, we didn't send Huygens directly to Titan. We put it on the back of the satellite, Cassini. We made Cassini fly to Saturn. We threaded it through a tiny crack in Saturn's perilous rings. We put Cassini into a perfect orbit around Saturn, passing this moon, then that, then another, taking pictures the whole time. Just before Christmas, Cassini launched Huygens on a 2.5 million-mile trip to Titan. Huygens survived atmospheric entry and opened three parachutes in sequence, ejecting its heat shields and slowing from 12,000 mph to a gentle landing.
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We didn't send Cassini straight to Saturn. Given its weight, that was impossible. So we invented a shortcut: We made its route longer. Yes, longer. We sent Cassini around the Sun and past Venus for a velocity-boosting "gravity assist" (derived from being slung around the planet) in 1998. Then we sent it around again for two more assists from Venus and Earth in 1999. That gave it enough speed to get to Jupiter for a final gravity assist in 2000, which propelled it to Saturn four years later. The trip required a perfect symphony of projections over seven years, so that Cassini would barely miss each orbiting planet. Total distance: 2.2 billion miles.
The coordination required to pull this off is extraordinary. I am continuously awed by humanity's technical abilities. Science is cool!
Posted by georgegmacdonald at January 20, 2005 04:34 PM