Celestia Forums

When the Huygens probe is sent to land on Titan's surface will it beable to send back photos of the landscape and how the atmosphere and sky might look if you were standing on it? Like the martian rovers were capable of and the viking landers. Is the landing point known? Will saturn be visible in Titan's sky? I was doing some research about the probe and I think I found that it has a camera that is capable of taking such shots but not sure. I'm very interested in what this probe is capable of showing us. So does anyone have any insights? Thanks in advance!

You'll have more luck in this forum. I suspect this is the last time I'll ever move a thread <i>out</i> of purgatory.

--Chris

hehe sorry about that, thanks for moving the thread:). I didn't realize this was the correct forum. Dunno why I thought it had to do with the more technical things about orbits and stuff. You've got a great program chris! I was just on the internet one day and I thought "hmmm there has to be a "universe simulator" out there somewhere (I was interested on seeing planets like jupiter and saturn). Lo and behold I was directly brought to you're page and you're software is great. So are all the people who provide add-ons. But as for the topic on hand I really hope that the Huygens probe has a camera capable of taking true color pics as in what the eyes would percieve titan's surface to look like. I read up about it and it even has an instrument for the detection of liquid. Incase it landed in a puddle or something. :p

There's supposed to be enough light at the surface of Titan to see by, and the probe has a little floodlight to take pictures of nearby objects. The landing point will depend on exactly when the probe is released, and on the prevailing winds, so I guess that's tied down only in an approximate way by the orbital configuration. Maybe someone else here knows if there are plans to fine-tune the landing point on the basis of the first few Titan flybys?
As to the visibility of Saturn, we've recently had something of a huge and inconclusive debate about that on the forum - at that time I was saying nononono, you'll never see Saturn ... but the last two issues of Icarus have some interesting things to say relevant to the topic. (More later, for those that don't have access to the journal ... )

Grant