January 14, 2005,
the day had finally arrived -
the day that I'd thought about
every day for 17 years.
near Saturn, there was something
that we'd built and it was hurtling
through space at 20,000 mph.
Would it do just what we'd designed
it to do or would it all be wasted?
We went into the science room
that morning
knowing that whatever
was going to happen
was going to happen,
and this was the day.
There was an enormous
air of expectation.
Basically anyone I met
was as excited but also as nervous
as I was about the whole mission.
Frankly I think we
were all petrified.
But the very worst thing that
shouldn't have happened, happened.
And it turned out it was a
major problem.
I just wanted to go away
and cry in a corner.
That really ramped up the nerves and there's
a missing command, what else is wrong?
I really had visions now of
the last 17 years having been wasted.
# MUSIC: "Red Planet Rock"
by Don Lang & His Frantic Five
# Everybody, watch the sky
# The weather's all jumping
and I'll tell you why... #
Growing up in the late 50s,
all I knew about space travel was
probably from reading about Dan Dare,
for example, in the Eagle comic.
I knew very little about the planets,
probably from schoolbooks.
All we knew was from often rather blurry,
indistinct images from telescopes on the ground.
I think I knew that Saturn
was a large ball of gas.
We call it a gas giant, and it was
about 1 billion miles away from us
here on the Earth, but I certainly
didn't know anything about Titan.
I didn't know that it was one of
Saturn's moons orbiting around it.
I mean you have to remember we didn't
have any spacecraft images of course,
and then something happened
to change all of that.
NEWSREADER: 'Half an hour ago,
the Russians announced
'that they had put
the first man into space.
'It's the voice in space of
Major Yuri Gagarin.'
'It must be
one of the greatest scientific
'events for one of the greatest
occasions in the history of man.'
It was absolutely mind-boggling.
It's impossible now really to
imagine the impact that it made.
Man in space.
Excuse me, what do you think of
the news? I think it's fantastic.
Well, I can tell you he's now back,
safe and sound. Really?
I didn't think he would get back.
Well, I say, very best of British
good luck to the chap myself.
Within months of Gagarin's flight,
he embarked on a world tour
and I think it's true that the first port
of call was the United Kingdom and London.
Major Gagarin, could you tell us what you
think of the reception of the British public?
TRANSLATOR SPEAKS RUSSIAN
GAGARIN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
The welcome I have been given by the
British public has been overwhelming.
It has been most friendly and kind.
TRANSLATOR CONTINUES:
'I see smiling faces everywhere...'
What about you,
would you like to be a spaceman?
Oh, well, it all depends.
If it comes up, like everybody
in a kind of craze,
I think I might have a go.
You might have a go, might you? Yes.
What did you think of the Major?
I liked his uniform and I like
the company all around us.
The school that I was at, Highgate,
was very close to Highgate Cemetery.
Of course, every visiting Russian dignitary
had to visit the tomb of Karl Marx.
I remember school was cancelled
for the afternoon.
It was such a big event, you know, Gagarin
coming to London, coming to Highgate.
I think I only decided to come
along here at the last minute.
I'm not sure why. I don't know if I'm a believer
in fate but it must have been fate, mustn't it?
And it was my eureka moment -
seeing that man standing here -
a small man, but the thought he had been
in space for what was it, 96 minutes?
The first astronaut,
and I was hooked from that moment on.
The Gagarin flight
was really what kickstarted it all.
It really took us out of that
science fiction era
into the era of practicality,
and one can see it as the first step
on our exploration
of the solar system with humans
and also with robotic spacecraft.
It's one of those things, if you
grew up in the late 60s, early 70s,
you know, space was everywhere.
It was the most exciting thing, you
just wanted to be involved in it,
probably couldn't even
imagine that you would be.
There was a little bit of affluence
and some of the social boundaries
and barriers were breaking down.
There was the so-called Youth
Revolution and I was caught up
in many of the demonstrations that
were going on against the Vietnam War.
It was a fascinating time.
NEIL ARMSTRONG:
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
I was always interested in space.
I was interested in
unmanned space exploration,
seeing other planets up close.
All of this helped us cement,
I think, this hope,
this dream that I had that I could
actually take this further.
I could get my physics degree.
I could then perhaps do a PhD,
and really move to be a part of
this whole worldwide space activity.
I stir it up with my feet.
There it is, I can see it from here.
It's orange.
AMERICAN NEWSREEL: Only once every
Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune -
so aligned that a spacecraft can
visit all four on a single flight.
The rare opportunity to probe
these planets occurs in this decade,
the 1970s, and will not recur until
the middle of the 22nd century.
Most of what we knew about
Titan, at least at this time,
was from the Voyager spacecraft.
We knew that Titan was about 5,000 km in
diameter, so bigger than the planet Mercury.
It had a thick atmosphere.
This is what really made it stand out
amongst all of the planetary
satellites in the solar system.
It's the only one that does.
But we knew essentially
nothing about the surface
because Titan is permanently shrouded
in orange haze or smog,
which meant that none of the images
showed anything of the surface.
We know it's very cold.
Saturn and its satellites
are so far from the sun.
The atmosphere is very complex,
it was known to have at least 12
different gases and probably having
some similarity to Earth's
very primitive atmosphere,
one that we lost
probably billions of years ago.
There was organic chemistry on Titan which was
interesting but that Titan wasn't warm enough
to have a liquid water which of course is one
of the prerequisites for life as we know it.
And I think Titan sort of faded
into the background in a sense
for much of the following decade.
Well, towards the end of the 1970s,
jobs in British universities
were very difficult to come by
and I saw an advertisement,
which was very hard to resist, to go
and work on a project called Giotto.
Now Giotto was Europe's Halley's
Comet mission and the job was at the
University of Kent to be project
manager for the dust instrument.
I applied and I got it so, at the
end of 1981, we moved to Canterbury
on a two-year contract and I
ended up staying there 18 years.
Giotto flew 594 km from
the nucleus of Halley's Comet.
I mean, it was remarkably close.
And we detected about
These are the particles
that make up the tail of a comet.
I think it was a mission that gave Europe confidence
that it could really do ambitious things in space.
After the success of Giotto,
the European Space Agency
were very democratic about selecting
the next scientific mission.
They had five candidate missions
and we got involved in a team
on a mission called Vesta.
Now Vesta was going to fly
past an asteroid
and we were part of the group that was looking
at the possibility of firing some penetrators.
They would be fired into the surface of the asteroid
and make measurements of the physical properties,
and we came to the day of selection and, to
our horror, it wasn't Vesta that they chose.
They selected a mission called
Cassini, going to a place called Titan -
a place that I'd hardly heard of and we
were completely deflated and ejected by this.
I remember still the journey
back to Canterbury from Bruges.
We went on the train and the ferry, and
it was a pretty depressing, glum journey.
We got back to the lab and I said,
"Look, have we really wasted
the last year?
"Is it possible that some of the work
that we've done on the Vesta mission,
"which they didn't choose,
we could actually adapt
"to this strange place Titan that
they were proposing to go to?"
We sat down with a cup of coffee and had a look at
what it was that the European Space Agency had chosen.
Cassini, as proposed, was going to be the most ambitious
space mission ever sent to the outer solar system.
It was planned to carry the first dedicated
set of instruments for Saturn and its system,
and it was to carry a probe that would
detach and land on the surface of Titan.
Now, pretty soon, we realised that
the part of it that really interested
us was the probe, which was going to
descend through Titan's atmosphere.
It was going to make the bulk of
its measurements during the descent.
And we realised how embarrassing it
would be if the thing landed
and it didn't have anything with which
to make measurements on the surface.
So we literally listed
all of the physical properties
that you might want to measure
on the surface of Titan.
We then wrote a proposal in response
to the call for proposals to produce
a quite ambitious, though small, little
instrument called the Surface Science Package.
We beat the deadline by about a day.
We sat and waited for the decision.
And, to our amazement,
we were selected.
A new and very exciting space probe
is being planned for the 1990s.
Dr John Zarnecki is closely
associated with this probe,
and we are delighted to welcome him
now to the Sky at Night
for the first time
but I certainly hope not the last.
Welcome, John. Thank you.
I do my Sky at Night programme.
I did do a programme about Titan,
who to invite on it?
Obviously, John. I didn't know then
what a good broadcaster he was,
and he came and we discussed Titan.
'But, of course, so far,'
we've only been able to
study the top part of it.
We still don't know what the surface is like and
that's the reason for sending up this Titan lander.
Will you tell us about that, John?
I should tell you that it's
already been christened in fact.
It's called the Huygens probe,
named after the Dutch physicist,
Christiaan Huygens,
who discovered Titan.
'I was billed as a Titan expert.'
I hadn't written a single scientific paper about
Titan and this was a very bizarre situation.
He didn't know much about the surface of Titan,
but neither did anybody else, me as much as anybody.
All in all, this is one of the most
ambitious vehicles ever planned,
what do you think are
the chances of success?
We must be optimistic, you would never embark
on a mission like this if one wasn't optimistic.
And I expect that we might be sitting here in 13 years'
time discussing the results from the Cassini mission.
'I think it began to dawn on us, just
in the weeks after we were selected.
'We had to produce an instrument,
one of a set of six
'scientific instruments,
a bit bigger than a shoebox.
'It had to travel in a probe
in deep space for over seven years,
'descend through this thick,
rather mysterious atmosphere
'and then make measurements on this
very alien and unknown surface.
'And it had to give us answers, it
had to make sense of this alien world.'
I mean that was a daunting prospect.
I had to start building up the team.
There were several
critical positions.
Arguably the most important
position is the project manager.
That's the person who really runs the show
day to day and brings the whole thing together.
'OK, one thing we've got to decide is exactly
who to send to the meeting with Peter.'
One of my colleagues knew John
Zarnecki from maybe 10, 15 years earlier
and they said, "I saw John the other day
and he's looking for a project manager,
"why don't you give him a ring?"
And, amazingly, because of him, I
had this new space science career.
The instrument had originally been selected in
When I arrived they'd just really had a few prototypes
on the bench, some of them were very Blue Peter.
I remember a washing-up bottle with
a steel ruler attached that was the
density sensor and the thing was huge and we had
to turn this into an 8g sensor to fly to Titan.
When Mark came on board, there were
two big issues that we had to face.
One was to put the final team together and,
more importantly, was to get the funding.
Because being selected was
only half of the battle.
We then had to get funding
from our national agencies.
'Our funding situation is stable,'
if you call underfunding
a good thing to report.
We were underfunded two years ago and
we're underfunded to the same extent now.
We were cut back to about two-thirds of
what we actually needed to do the job,
so we had to look at clever ways of
getting round the funding shortfall.
This was around the time of perestroika,
when the Iron Curtain was coming down.
NEWSREADER: Bulldozers tonight began
to open new holes in the Berlin Wall.
Throughout the day, thousands of
people have been crossing freely
from East to West Berlin
and back again.
I saw an opportunity here to use some of the
professional connections that I had with Poland
to see whether we could go there and use their
desire to work with the West in scientific research,
and we found out that they were quite
experienced at building space instruments,
so basically we cut a deal.
They would build
a part of the instrument
in exchange for coming on board and seeing essentially
how space research was done in Western Europe.
Now that was one thing that we did,
the other was to take advantage
of the fact that we were a university
and one thing that universities have
generally in profusion is students,
and, generally,
students are fairly cheap.
I won't quite say
slave labour but nearly.
MUSIC: "Mirrorball" by Elbow
The whole project seemed a lot like science
fiction in the sense that somehow we were going to
build this thing that was going to
travel a billion miles through space
and then parachute down through
this atmosphere at minus 200 Celsius
and touch the surface of
one of the moons of Saturn.
It just boggles the mind that
you can contemplate doing that.
Ralph is enthusiastic about
everything he turns his attention to,
and he became very quickly
embroiled in all aspects of Titan.
And one of the tasks that we assigned
to him was to develop the penetrometer.
One the things we really want to
answer with the Surface Science
Package is what is the actual
nature of the surface of Titan?
What's it made of? Is it solid like
ice or is it slushy or is it liquid?
This part of the package, called a penetrometer,
aims to do that by measuring how hard we land in it.
As the probe comes down,
we measure the impact forces.
It's very strange, you sort of come
into this from the outside thinking
that there's some massive team of
top notch engineers and scientists
who've done this all before and that you
will be allocated some little part of it.
And the reality is, there's
never enough people
and everyone is improvising because nobody's
built anything that went to Titan before.
So it was at first a little
strange and surprising that
I'd get to do this but it
was an incredible opportunity.
In the early days of the project,
we were being followed by a
BBC crew who were filming
some aspects of the project for
an Open University programme.
It was an eye opener
- the first time I'd been involved in that kind of thing.
They actually set up a little
video diary for us,
a little passport photo, where you just sit in
front of this video camera and say what had happened.
It's April 13th, last week we
donned these crazy suits and went in
the clean room to assemble the
engineering model penetrator.
This instrument will perform
thermal properties measurements
to show the thermal conductivity and
the temperature of the Titan ocean.
This will be sent to a way to be
shaken, baked,
and electrically tested
in what is called the top hat,
that is the thing that
holds all the experiments.
As you can see, it's
quite small and fiddly,
but I'm rather pleased with it.
Science students tend to be nerdy,
and, I think, as a group
we conformed to that stereotype,
so that it means you're really
utterly focused on what you're doing
when you have three years where you have no
other commitments other than to do your research,
and because building a space experiment
going to Titan is such a motivating thing,
it was really wonderful
actually to have that focus.
The penetrometer was a fairly simple
sensor in concept,
but actually doing it well took
a lot of work and a lot of effort.
Ralph was involved with running a load of prototype
tests and dropping things into bucket of sand
and seeing how different
tip shapes responded, etc.
I remember one of the first things we did
was got some sand from Whitstable Beach
and that was a huge mistake because it was real
sand at the sea and so it was all wet and salty.
And, of course, salty water is an
electrical conductor and of course
the signals we got from
that were just terrible.
It was building an instrument to go
somewhere that we didn't know what
we were going to land on, and that
was a real part of the fascination.
It's one thing to make a measurement in a laboratory,
it's another to make an experiment that is going
to work, for sure, seven years later after
travelling through space for a billion miles,
that's going to work
at 200 degrees below zero
and that isn't going to suffer
any kind of problem.
The biggest fears we had were landing on absolutely
sharp, exposed ice, which meant the runners of the
probe might die pretty quickly, and our challenge
was to get the data back before the probe died.
At the time, one of the main
speculations about Titan's surface
was that it was covered by a
global ocean of liquid methane
and so I spent quite a
lot of time doing my PhD
modelling the splashdown
dynamics, looking at all the old
Apollo literature of how a capsule
decelerates when it hits the water,
and trying to figure out how much
the Huygens probe
would decelerate if it landed
in liquid methane.
A lot of it was theoretical stuff.
Do we have global oceans, do we have seas,
do we have lakes, anywhere in between?
The natural speculation was,
Well, it'll be like landing
on Mars or landing on the moon but we had no
idea what the materials really are, if it's ice
or if it's ground-up ice like sand, or if it's
some sort of organic dust that's very fluffy.
So we had to consider
all these possibilities.
We certainly didn't know anything
that would let us
exclude any of them.
This is the final engineering
model of the Huygens Surface
Science Package, containing
its nine different sensors.
We've got here
the speed of sound instrument
to measure the speed of sound in
the atmosphere and on the surface.
Here we have the sonar,
designed to send a signal down to the
surface of Titan or to the bottom
of the lake to measure its depth.
Inside this enclosure here, we've got
six further instruments to measure
various properties of the liquid
or the solid surface,
and finally
we have here the penetrometer.
MUSIC: "Future Proof"
by Massive Attack
Yeah, output lines are clear and we're
running at about 6 PSI over ambience.
Once you get into the
hardware phase of the project,
there's testing, testing, testing,
and some of these tests run
for tens of hours at a time.
There were times when I felt
that I knew my milkman better than
my family because I was arriving
home at 5 o'clock in the morning.
Can we have temperatures
please, James?
Top cavity 111, bottom cavity 114.
For this particular mission, one of the really unusual
things was when we got there, we were going into
a very, very cold environment, so many of the
sensors we needed to test in liquid methane.
It is a little bit hazardous, so we were
doing this on the roof of the physics building,
I guess the logic being that if we blew up,
we only blew ourselves up and no-one else.
A project like this
inevitably put strains
on all the individuals involved,
and that's challenging enough.
I'm not sure that my family really
understood quite what I was doing,
they sort of supported me, but probably
thought that I was the crazy scientist
and maybe every family
had to have one crazy scientist.
I was very lucky in the sense
that I'm quite a self-motivated,
self-driven kind of guy so
I didn't need a lot of handholding.
And that was just as well
because John was a busy man.
The job he was doing as a university lecturer and
building a space experiment was quite demanding,
and he was going through some
personal difficulties at the time too.
The early days of the project coincided
with the breakdown of my marriage,
so I have to say there was
about a year in the project
that was very, very difficult.
I find it difficult even
to think back to those times.
It was difficult to keep
everything going, frankly,
and I was very lucky I had a really good team
who, when things got very difficult for me,
they were more than able
to keep the show on the road.
There were some very, very long working hours
involved, particularly when you get to the flight model
and you're trying to get
everything to meet the deadline.
If you miss the delivery,
you're not going to Titan.
You ever have one of those
weeks where nothing works?
Our fax machine is broken,
the photocopier didn't work,
the coffee machine is broken down,
even the BBC's bloody light has stopped,
so we have to improvise with this desk lamp.
I'm sitting in this dark old laboratory with an
experiment that's not working and you sort of think,
is this really what I want to do?
Have I made the right decision?
But then you remember
the bigger picture.
The project developed, it was hard and painful at
times, but finally we got to the very last test.
This was the vibration test.
And can you believe what happened?
The damned thing broke.
The structure which held our
instrument together cracked.
I was personally
devastated to hear the news.
I realised the impact of it
straightaway,
that even just rebuilding the
top hat was going to be a problem,
but the fact we had to
rebuild the sensors too
meant that every aspect of the project had
its hands full with a huge, huge workload.
It was really the possibility that the European
Space Agency might say, "I'm sorry, guys,
"you're not going to make
the delivery date,
"you're not going to be on the
probe, you're not going to Titan."
And, at that point, it was at least four
years of my life dedicated to that instrument.
We had to find a solution,
we had to get out of this hole.
It had taken maybe six months
to build this flight model,
and we were two weeks away from delivery
and had to rebuild the whole thing.
For John, it was an even
longer time on this project
and, again, he knew instantly
that there was a chance
we were getting thrown off
this mission.
We came up with a strategy, whereby we would
deliver the engineering model to the spacecraft,
that would enable ESA to
continue with their programme,
they couldn't hold it up.
This meant we had to dismantle the
whole thing, remove all the harness,
fix the structure but also
build flight spare instruments,
calibrate them,
put the whole thing back together.
In the end, it took about three or four months to go
through the whole thing again but it was touch and go.
We worked around it,
we came up with an alternative design,
and we delivered that to the spacecraft.
Late, but it was working.
MUSIC: "Safe From Harm"
by Massive Attack
NEWS REPORTER:
Titan, the hazy moon around Saturn.
Today a huge rocket is being prepared
to explore that distant world.
Europe and America have joined forces
in a 3.5 billion mission called Cassini.
This was it. We flew out
to Florida for the launch.
To our surprise, we were actually
greeted there by protesters.
'With legions of protesters climbing
the gates at the air station,
'opponents have maintained that
'NASA's plutonium powered satellite could
kill the innocent should something go wrong.'
They blow up all the
time here, you know and,
for some reason
of insanity I can't imagine,
they're going to stick 72lbs
of plutonium atop this thing.
What I want to see is a safe world.
I don't want nuclear in space.
If you go out to the distance
of Saturn from the sun,
sunlight is very weak,
so you can't use the traditional way
of generating electricity
on a spacecraft,
which is to use solar cells.
So, you have to do
something else and this is true
of all outer solar system missions.
And what is done is to use
radioactive material.
This case plutonium.
And you use the
radiation that it emits
essentially to generate electricity.
That's the only way you can do it.
There seemed to be a sort
of knee-jerk reaction that
radioactivity is this terrible thing
but, for me, it was just
a necessary part of the spacecraft.
But how would the
protests affect the launch?
Would they get in the way, would
we be getting tomatoes thrown at us?
It took me back to my
time as a student in the 1960s
when I was doing the protesting,
when I was carrying the banners.
Now there I was, I was having
to cross the picket line.
The launch was in the middle of
the night at about three o'clock
in the morning and I think,
because of security and so on,
they had special buses
arranged for us.
Are you nervous?
Yes, I am.
Yeah, I'm a little nervous,
yes, just a bit.
Seven years' work and
this is the make or break night.
There's a lot of work down the
line from here but this is really
one place where it could fall down.
'It was always in the back of our
minds that any rocket is only'
so there's a good chance
that if the mission fails
it was going to fail now.
'Launch command systems now enabled.
'T minus 1 minute 30 seconds.'
Sat there biting fingernails
and trying not to get too nervous,
waiting for the
OK that they are going to launch.
'T minus 10,
'9, 8, 7...
'6, 5, 4,
'3, 2, 1.'
I saw flames at the base of the
rocket and the first thing
that went through my mind was
that the rocket's caught fire
and it's about to blow up
or something because the
ignition happens but it's several
miles away, and so the sound of the
ignition hasn't reached you yet,
you just see the flames and then
you see the rocket start to ascend.
Then the direct sound hits you
and there's this wall of deep
rumbling bass and you get a sense,
wow, now we're really on our way.
Cassini goes up and it was almost
by design, there was a cloud about,
I think, 1,000 feet or so right
above the launcher and then after a
few seconds it went into this cloud.
There was almost an explosion of light,
it looked like the thing had blown up.
This cloud was just a huge
ball of fire, it looked like.
For a fraction of a second it was
horror, it's gone, we've lost it,
but then we saw Cassini appearing
above the cloud.
It was coming through
and then it went up into this clear
black sky, absolutely serene,
a truly wonderful sight.
Once it was off and through that
cloud, you knew it was going,
you knew it was going
to be a good launch.
I guess I kept an eye
on the rocket all the way up
till it was a tiny dot.
During the journey to Titan,
we actually moved our team to the
Open University in Milton Keynes.
A lot of things do happen in some
respects, I mean one is rather sad
because the team that we'd built up
to design, build, and launch the SSP,
much of that team dissolves.
We don't have the funding to keep
that team going all the way through.
But we kept a core team together
because roughly every six months
we switched the instruments on
and we ran through
what are called housekeeping tests.
How do you go into mode 4,
on time or on altitude?
This time we went in
using the 7 km as altitude.
We'd check out the instrument,
make sure the spacecraft was working
fine, that our instrument was working fine.
There were a few
minor things we monitored
and a few software bits we changed.
Nothing too major from our side.
What you have do understand
is that when Huygens
was planned to be descending
onto the surface of Titan,
it would be relaying its data
not directly back to Earth,
there just wasn't the power for that,
but sending the data up to Cassini,
which would be flying some
thousands of kilometres overhead.
Cassini would then relay it a
few hours later back to the Earth.
There was a major scare
on the spacecraft.
They tried a particular test of the
communication system and realised that there was a
problem and with the
mission as it was designed,
we weren't going to get
the science data back.
One thing that was tried was using
a radio telescope on the ground
to pretend to be Huygens and transmit
a signal as if it was Huygens,
to check that Cassini could
receive that signal correctly.
When the results of the test were
reported to us in a science meeting,
they said we did the test and we're
not sure quite what happened
because we didn't get
all of the data back.
To put it simply, it's as if
Huygens was transmitting on Radio 1
and Cassini was receiving on Radio 2.
In other words there was a
very slight mismatch
in the frequencies but it was enough
to potentially scupper
the whole of the Huygens project.
That was obviously a
huge, huge problem,
very frightening from the
scientists' point of view
but the system quickly got together and
came up with some options for solutions.
There were 11 possible
options that were found that might
be able to address this problem.
In the end we picked on one of them
as being the potential saviour.
This involved Cassini,
instead of releasing Huygens
on the first orbit around Saturn,
releasing it on the third orbit.
That would change the geometry between
Cassini and Huygens by just the right amount
to bring the two frequencies back
into synchronism, quite remarkable.
'Now how long does it take a
spacecraft to travel 2 billion miles
'between planet Earth and Saturn?
'Nearly seven years
is the answer and tonight,
'for the spacecraft Cassini,
the journey is nearly over.'
Well, today's the culmination
of our seven-year trip through
space and we are arriving at Saturn and we're going
to fire the engine to stop us into orbit around Saturn,
so it's the end of the trip but
really the start of the tour.
The excitement for me is in the
future when we get close to Titan
but this is a big moment so kind of a bit of a party
atmosphere here in Pasadena to celebrate the arrival.
There have been one or two occasions in planetary
exploration where spacecraft have blown up
on arrival when they've used
their engines for the first time.
Current Cassini altitude 20,700 km,
We are slowing down.
Cassini would have to use its main
engine for a very large burn
to break into orbit around
Saturn so it was a tense moment.
We'd be crossing the ring plain as well
which has some element of hazard to it.
Go ahead, Com.
The Doppler has blacked out.
OK, we have burn complete here
for the FY orbit insertion burn.
That was a big moment,
and then once it was in orbit then
everything was just quiet and
basically following the script
just the way it was supposed to.
It would actually be a little over six
months before Huygens was delivered to Titan.
# Oh, the weather outside
is frightful
# But the fire is so delightful
# And since we've no place to go
# Let it snow, let it snow
let it snow. #
Christmas Day 2004, it was the day
of the planned release of the
Huygens probe from Cassini.
Basically there were a set of
explosive bolts that released
Huygens, and a set of springs
pushed it off on spiral rails
that gave it a spin to stabilise it.
Everything was pre-programmed
on Cassini,
we were monitoring it
and it went fantastically.
From that point on, Huygens was on
its own, completely autonomous.
It didn't even
carry a radio receiver,
so from then on if we'd wanted
to change something we couldn't,
we were completely powerless.
The die was cast from that point.
When I got into the control centre,
basically everyone I met was as
excited also as nervous as I
was about the whole mission.
There was an enormous air
of expectation,
it had been building up
for the last few days.
We went into the science
room that morning knowing that
whatever was going to happen was
going to happen, this was the day.
Some people had said Oh,
nobody will be interested in this,
but by this time we had something
like 300 of the world's press there
waiting to see what would happen.
There was lots of
vans and TV cameras parked outside
and anyone who could be grabbed
by media guys were getting grabbed.
There was a little bit
of a siege mentality,
a scientist was kind of
walled away in our little room.
It was hard to concentrate on the
important work
and not get distracted by all the
calls for your time.
I couldn't stop thinking
that about 1.5 billion miles away
out there, there was something
that I had built about this size,
and it was hurtling through
space at 20,000 mph
and it was about to get
a rude awakening.
The plan was Huygens would hit
the top of Titan's atmosphere
at a speed of 7 km a second.
Over the next two minutes it would
slow down to about 400m a second.
At that point, Huygens would deploy
the first of three parachutes and that
would enable it to float down to the
surface at a relatively slow speed.
Then the six scientific
instruments would be switched on
to really perform their job
that they'd been waiting for
for about seven
and a half years.
Around 10:30 in the morning,
a rumour comes through
that one of the largest radio
telescopes on the Earth
has picked up a signal
directly from Huygens.
It looks like we've
heard the baby crying.
We still can't understand
what it tells us,
but clearly it tells
us that the probe is alive,
the entry has been successful,
we are on the parachute,
and the probe is transmitting.
The project scientist Jean-Pierre
Lebreton announced that news and
there was a huge cheer, it
really meant a lot to all of us.
We knew that the most critical
part of the mission was successful.
It is absolutely fantastic news.
It's like hearing the
ringing tone on the phone,
it tells us the phone is working.
There's no information on it yet
but it's absolutely fantastic.
That was great news because it
means that it wasn't gone
without trace, that even if we
didn't get all the data back
or if the probe didn't make it down to
the surface, at least there was something.
We have a signal meaning that we
knew that Huygens is alive,
so the dream is alive.
Though it really encouraged us,
we still had a long time to wait.
The real scientific data
wasn't expected
till halfway through the afternoon.
We were expecting to get the data
at around 17:25
Central European Time,
so we were gathered
in the main control room,
there was lots of banter,
lots of discussion,
people were excited,
people were talking.
As we got towards the time,
we were watching the screens,
I noticed that things were
starting to get a bit tense.
I was just listening to some of the discussions
on the voice link and there was something
that concerned me, there was a
missing command,
and I knew that
for some instruments this was
going to be a technical problem,
we were maybe going to have some
system problems and lose some data.
So that really ramped up the nerves
after we've had the really good news
and we know the probe itself
is worked, had we lost the data?
absolutely nothing on the screens.
I can remember
my mouth going very dry
and it got very quiet
in that room.
OK, maybe I've got the time slightly
wrong, is my watch exactly right,
and for the first minute it
wasn't too much of a concern and then you
could feel the tension in the room building.
I really had visions now of
the last 17 years having been wasted.
Something had happened to our probe,
parachutes hadn't deployed,
the probe had burned up,
the transmitter had malfunctioned.
I really
imagined us staring at blank screens.
And then, and I think it was about
six minutes later than we expected,
suddenly there was a shout
and I looked up and I could
see on the screen in front of me
one of the columns
where we were expecting data
was full.
This was real data
coming through from Huygens.
It was absolute huge relief
to see the screens light up
with colour and display.
You could just feel the
tension pop in the room.
People could start seeing
from the data various
aspects of the descent, they could
tell what speed we were falling at.
After a while, somebody said you know
we've had two hours of descent,
I mean we must be getting
close to the surface.
My instrument, the Surface
Science Package, its main aim was
to make measurements for however
long we lasted on the surface.
We were told initially anyway
to plan for three minutes on
the surface only, so we designed it for all of our
measurements to be done in that very narrow timeframe.
If we didn't reach the surface by
out into surface mode, which would
be disaster because we'd actually
lose some of our major data,
and the probe was descending way,
way slower than anyone expected.
SSP, can I have a status report?
'OMSSP, status nominal on B.
'We think we've detected surface.'
In the end we had just over three
minutes spare when we hit the surface.
I came back into the support area
and heard that the data had been
delivered and so I went up to my
colleagues and I wanted the data.
It was on a stick, so I was Who's
got the stick, give me the stick!
I ran into the lab,
the guys were there clustered around
one single PC screen and just as I
got there and I was about to ask
the question, Do we have data yet?
the screen burst into life and we
saw every single sensor had worked.
We'd got effectively a perfect data
set, and the boys were ecstatic.
There was tremendous
outpouring of emotion in that room
and I have to say that I did go off
at one point into the corner and I...
I was crying, frankly. It was I think
the release of all that emotion
after all of those years.
We'd been through so much together.
'So we are the first
visitors of Titan, and scientific
'data that we are collecting now
shall unveil the secrets.'
A few of the guys were
looking just at the impact data
and looking at the penetrative data,
and there was a distinct spike
right at the start of the signal.
We've hit something hard, it's
as if we've hit a crust on the top,
and then after that the material below is much softer
and we've pushed into that without much resistance.
We had to make a chart for John to present to the
media at the press conference later that evening
of what the possibilities were
and we sort of wrote,
"Well it could be sort of
like packed snow or maybe
"sort of wet clay but there's this
extra spike at the beginning
"so maybe there's a crust."
And one of my team actually has
suggested an alternative analogue and
this is because of the
crust perhaps we see there,
and that is creme brulee,
but I don't suppose that will
be appearing in our papers.
And the media just love that, it
was a headline in Nature magazine
that week, "Titan Team Gets Its Just
Desserts with Creme Brulee Surface"
or something so that was really
good PR coming up with that analogy.
We can report that the Surface
Science Package collected data
for 3 hours 37 minutes.
Apart from any scientific
and engineering importance
of that figure,
some of you might have heard
that we had a sweepstake in our team
for the moment of impact
and I'm slightly embarrassed,
I have to tell you,
that it was I who won the sweepstake
and the prize, which was a very
old bottle of Scottish medicine...
..was consumed by the team
at about 2:30 this morning.
John put in a good bet,
he was 10 seconds off on a two
and a half hour descent time, that's
almost a magical touch I think.
Oh, no, it seemed actually
entirely appropriate.
I mean he was the leader, he was
the guy that made it all happen.
There was barely a single day
since the project had started
when I hadn't tried to imagine what
the surface of Titan looked like.
I remember the first few images
that we saw were quite remarkable.
We saw this landscape carved
with what look like river channels.
The theory there had been liquid
on the surface of Titan was true,
it was absolutely amazing to see it,
the first people to see that image.
Also it struck me that it
looks so much like Earth.
It looked like Arizona,
it looked like the French Riviera,
it looked familiar and that wasn't
something I think we were expecting.
And then we saw the landing image,
the area immediately
around the probe.
It was an area that seemed to
be strewn with boulders and I
just couldn't believe that our probe,
that we of course knew so well, and
my beloved instruments on board, were
actually sitting quietly, serenely,
on this surface environment.
What we've learned is that
Titan's surface is incredibly varied.
It shows features
which show some similarities,
at least superficially, with Earth.
We're now pretty certain that we see
lakes and seas of liquid methane.
There's a whole range of geophysical processes
going on that's shaping the surface of Titan.
We've learned an enormous
amount about the atmosphere.
We have a stratosphere,
we have a troposphere,
we have weather,
we have weather on Titan.
I think it shows our sphere
of influence, if you like,
our sphere of knowledge
expanding beyond the Earth.
Our machines have put
their foot on the surface of Titan.
We've shown that we can do it.
It's part of that process
of exploration
that I think we've always done.
It's part of what
defines us as human beings.
To get closer to the Mission to
Titan and explore the stars yourself
with the Open University's
Virtual Planisphere, go to:
Follow the
links to the Open University.