L.J. Carter Memorial Lecture

10 March 2010
7 – 8.30 pm

The ESA Huygens probe which descended to the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, five years ago is the subject of the 2010 British Interplanetary Society (BIS) L.J. Carter Memorial Lecture. It will be given by Prof John Zarnecki of the Open University.

On 14 January 2005, Huygens became the most distant man-made object to land on another world. During its descent and landing, it beamed back to the Cassini spacecraft around four hours’ worth of invaluable scientific data, revealing Titan to be a world with both striking similarities to and alien differences from Earth.

Huygens arrived at Titan following a seven-year voyage attached to the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft. It then spent almost two-and-half-hours descending by parachute through Titan’s atmosphere, blasted by winds of up to 430 km/h.

Once it touched down, Huygens spent another 70 minutes transmitting more data before the Cassini spacecraft moved out of range. The Huygens signal then continued to be received for another two hours by a network of radio telescopes on Earth.

Prof Zarnecki, one of Huygens’ lead scientists, will be talking about the momentous mission and discussing many of the findings from the wealth of data acquired.

(Member discount of £5 per ticket will be applied as part of the checkout process when you have supplied your membership details.)