Mission to saturn moon titan

[Denis12]

What can i expect from a mission to titan ,the moon of saturn,how is the atmosphere of titan,is it breathable ,do you need a spacesuit or maybe not. Is it warm there or just cold. I have seen that a lander has landed on its surface,but the photographs where not really sharp ,and what kind of lander was it that landed on titan? Denis.

[Doodler]

http://www.bautforum.com/showthread....hlight=Huygens

Bit of a long one, with one branch off into a REAL oddball discussion over gravity (that one is in Against the Mainstream, having followed it for over 40 pages, I have no desire to revisit that trauma.) This one will give you a good chunk of the data on Titan, which off the cuff, is quite hostile to life from Earth.

[Hamlet]

What can i expect from a mission to titan ,the moon of saturn,how is the atmosphere of titan,is it breathable ,do you need a spacesuit or maybe not. Is it warm there or just cold.

The atmosphere on Titan is not breathable. It's composed primarily of nitrogen, like Earth, but there is no free oxygen. In addition, Titan's atmosphere contains methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons. The surface pressure is about 1.5 times that of Earth but the surface temperature is only about 93K or about -180C. You would definitely need protection against the cold and a supply of oxygen.

I have seen that a lander has landed on its surface,but the photographs where not really sharp ,and what kind of lander was it that landed on titan? Denis.

The probe was called Huygens and it was delivered to Titan attached to the Cassini probe that is now orbiting Saturn. It was released on Dec. 25, 2004 and entered Titan's atmosphere on Jan 14, 2005. An engineering description of Huygens can be seen here.
The probe was actually not designed primarily as lander and was meant to take most of its measurements while descending on parachutes. However, Huygens was built robust enough to survive a hard surface landing or a landing in liquid. A description of the six instruments sub-systems can be found here.

The probe took about 2hr 28min to descend on the parachutes and did survide the landing. It continued to transmit data long past the time Cassini could receive it. All in all, the probe was highly successful.

Here's a good link to recently published peer-reviewed papers on the science that Huygens returned.

[Denis12]

Are there new photographs now,taken from the surface? And there is no sunshine on titan ,is that right?

[Hamlet]

Are there new photographs now,taken from the surface? And there is no sunshine on titan ,is that right?

No, there are no new photos from the surface. The batteries on Huygens only lasted about 5 hours. Even if Huygens was still alive, Cassini is not in a position to receive the data.

There is sunshine on Titan although it is diffused quite a bit by the continuous cloud cover. The surface shots were taken using only the ambient light.

[Doodler]

Weren't they able to retrieve some information from Huygens directly on Earth after a screw on one of the data transfer channels?

[banquo's_bumble_puppy]

Denis I like the way you think...BIG....wonderful to dream....and if you're gonna dream...do it big...have a wonderful future

[banquo's_bumble_puppy]

ps...maybe a manned mission in the next century???? ie. the 22nd century... who knows

[Hamlet]

Weren't they able to retrieve some information from Huygens directly on Earth after a screw on one of the data transfer channels?

The Receiver Ultra Stable Ocsillator (RUSO) on Cassini was never command on and thus all of the data on Channel A was lost. They were able to recover the Doppler Wind Experiment (DWE), which relied on detecting changes in the RUSO carrier frequency, using radio telescopes on Earth. However, the signal was too weak to extract any data from the signal. The images that were sent on Channel A were lost.

The Huygens team had decided to try to get more images by splitting them onto Channel A and B. This violated their redundancy policy they had used for the other science and engineering data that was transmitted on both channels.

[Wolverine]

Weren't they able to retrieve some information from Huygens directly on Earth after a screw on one of the data transfer channels?

They were able to perform necessary observations to reconstruct the Doppler Wind Experiment data from Earth-based radio telescopes, but lost half of the expected DISR imagery due to the Channel A failure (article).