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| Huygens probe |
| 2004-12-25 |
| "Xlbfn! It's a UFO!" The highlights of the first year of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn can be broken into two chapters: first, the arrival of the Cassini orbiter at Saturn in June, and second, the release of the Huygens probe on Dec. 24, 2004, on a path toward Titan. The Huygens probe, built and managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), is bolted to Cassini and fed electrical power through an umbilical cable. It has been riding along during the nearly seven-year journey to Saturn largely in a "sleep" mode, awakened every six months for three-hour instrument and engineering checkups. In three days, it will be cut loose from its mother ship and will coast toward Saturn's moon Titan, arriving on Jan. 14, 2005. "As partners with ESA, one of our obligations was to carry the Huygens probe to Saturn and drop it off at Titan," said Robert T. Mitchell, Cassini program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've done the first part, and on Christmas Eve we will release Huygens and tension-loaded springs will gently push it away from Cassini onto a ballistic free-fall path to Titan." |
| Posted by:Korora |