ESA Portal - Huygens lands in Titanian mud

Clicking the title will link you to a Macromedia Flash 'animation', comprising photos from the Huygens probe as it descends to Titan's surface.

"18 January 2005
This short animation is made up from a sequence of images taken by the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) instrument on board ESA's Huygens probe, during its successful descent to Titan on 14 January 2005.

It shows what a passenger riding on Huygens would have seen. The sequence starts from an altitude of 152 kilometres and initially only shows a hazy view looking into thick cloud. As the probe descends, ground features can be discerned and Huygens emerges from the clouds at around 30 kilometres altitude. The ground features seem to rotate as Huygens spins slowly under its parachute.

The DISR consists of a downward-looking High Resolution Imager (HRI), a Medium Resolution Imager (MRI) which looks out at an angle, and a Side Looking Imager (SLI). For this animation, most images used were captured by the HRI and MRI. Once on the ground, the final landing scene was captured by the SLI.

Credits: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona"