- english
Huygens on Titan!
Posted by Dumbbell on Wednesday January 19, 2005 at 12:44 AM
As everybody must have heard of, the Huygens probe as landed on Titan, on the 14th of January, 2005. It sent many informations and pictures to the Cassini orbiter; the latter retransmitted data back to Earth a few hours later.
To folllow this special event, the Cité des Sciences (Parc de la Villette, Paris) organized a public conference, the same day, at 8.30pm. After watching to NASA TV all the day, I couldn't miss this occasion ! As ESA was releasing informations, prestigeous guest stars such as André Brahic and Francis Rocard, as well as people in Darmstadt, Germany (where ESOC HQ is located), talked about the events of the day and made several presentations on the mission itself (history, involved countries, experiences, results from Cassini, technical details, etc.) or on Saturn (discoveries, rings mechanism, satellites overview, etc.). Documents were illustrated with great images from Cassini, the Voyager spacecrafts or from the VLT.
One of the best moments was the first 3 images from Huygens ! Those raw images were making of this success a reality. Eventhough every scientists were excited, all remained very careful about comments.
The conference took place in a auditorium, but as expected, it was over crowded very early. A large display was installed in the hall, so I and about 200-300 persons could see the con anyway. As usual with astronomy public events, the youngest and oldest people were very interested. Unfortunately, RATP didn't let the subway opened all the night, so I had to come back home before the end of the speeches.
- Cassini-Huygens homepage on NASA's website
- Cassini-Huygens homepage on ESA's website
- Cassini-Huygens (Wikipedia)
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry: https://www.dumbbell.fr/mt/mt-tb.cgi/16
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in,
.
Now you can comment.
(sign out)