It's BAAACK...with captions! The Titan/Huygens landing QuickTime movie

[eppur_se_muova]

A View from Huygens - Jan. 14, 2005

This movie was built with data collected during the 147-minute plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed by the European Space Agency's Huygens Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer on Jan. 14, 2005.

In 4 minutes and 40 seconds, the movie shows what the probe 'saw' within the few hours of the descent and the landing. On approach, Titan appeared as just a little disk in the sky among the stars, but after landing, the probe's camera resolved little grains of sand millions of times smaller than Titan.

At first, the Huygens camera just saw fog over the distant surface. The fog started to clear only at about 60 kilometers (37 miles) altitude, making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 meters (328 feet). Only after landing could the probe's camera resolve the little grains of sand. The movie provides a glimpse of such a huge change of scale.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=117
(link is directly under the picture)

A music-only version of the video is available at: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08118.
(Music by Ludwig von Beethoven)

[Mikimouse]

1. To use an old, outdated phrase...

DAMN, that was wicked cool!:hippie:

[BlueJazz]

2. Wow...Thanks for posting this.

The movie was a Trip!
In many ways. :)

[niallmac]

3. The DU is cool too. I never would have seen this.

I wonder if the fundies could be swayed to thinking this kind of adventure beats spending billions to kill
poor brown people any day?