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Sounds of Titan

Sounds of an Alien World

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NASA Salutes Successful Huygens Probe

NASA Salutes Successful Huygens Probe

NASA
After its seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA’s Huygens probe has successfully descended through the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and safely landed on its surface on January 14, 2005.

Audio data collected by the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI), which includes an acoustic sensor, during Huygens' descent, 14 January 2005.

  • Speeding through Titan's haze:
    This recording is a laboratory reconstruction of the sounds heard by Huygens' microphones. Several sound samples, taken at different times during the descent, are here combined together and give a realistic reproduction of what a traveller on board Huygens would have heard during one minute of the descent through Titan's atmosphere.
  • Radar echos from Titan's surface:
    This recording was produced by converting into audible sounds some of the radar echoes received by Huygens during the last few kilometres of its descent onto Titan. As the probe approaches the ground, both the pitch and intensity increase. Scientists will use intensity of the echoes to speculate about the nature of the surface.
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