Huygens Landing on Titan [MP4]

This is a short video clip of the Huygens spacecraft landing on Titan,

a moon of planet Saturn.



Saturn's moon Titan — larger than the planet Mercury and the only moon with an atmosphere — has always intrigued astronomers. Results exceeded expectations when the Huygens probe deployed its parachutes and drifted down through Titan's chemical haze, revealing bright highlands that drain in a river-like way to flat, dark lowlands, before landing in a material with the consistency of wet sand after a descent of 2 hr 28 min.



The surface colour is approximately what a human observer riding along with the probe would see if she or he could see through Titan's atmospheric haze. In the last few kilometres the point-of-view turns south, the direction the Huygens Probe is believed to be facing as it sits on the surface today.



The audio recording is a laboratory reconstruction of the sounds heard by Huygens' microphones.



I have simply overlaid the sounds and the video to give it a realistic appearance.





File Info:

MPEG-4 Files



Duration: 4 mins 40 seconds

24 bits, 320 x 240, 30 fps

Frame-based

MPEG-4 SP Video: 1024 Kbps

48000 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo

MPEG AAC Audio: 128 Kbps



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