Destination Titan Page #3

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"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.

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