Friday, January 13, 2006

The Huygens landing: one year on





The Huygens mission has been an outstanding engineering and scientific success, one of the most complex and scientifically rewarding space missions to date. The touchdown on the surface of Titan marked the farthest a man-made spacecraft has successfully landed away from Earth.

(Via Science Blog.)


Meanwhile . . .

NASA's Pluto Probe Set for Flight

A NASA probe bound for the planet Pluto and the distant icy realm of the Kuiper Belt is spending its final days on Earth as it nears its Jan. 17 launch date.

"We're in great shape," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told SPACE.com this week. "We have a very clean vehicle."

New Horizons cleared a Flight Readiness Review Thursday as the days tick down toward liftoff of the first-ever flyby mission to Pluto, mission officials said, adding that a series of mission news and science briefings will be broadcast on NASA TV beginning at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT).



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