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Politics : Idea Of The Day
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To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (47838)2/17/2005 6:31:54 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF  Read Replies (1) of 50167
 
Titan's wind-blown message reaches Earth
19 February 2005

From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

RADIO telescopes on Earth have picked up faint signals emitted by the Huygens probe as it descended through the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan on 14 January. This has allowed astronomers to measure the winds on Titan.

Due to a command error, the Cassini orbiter that released Huygens failed to pick up the signals. That meant the wind experiment would have been a total failure, except for the radio telescopes on Earth. Although Huygens was more than a billion kilometres away and its transmitters had roughly the power of a mobile phone, the sensitive telescopes picked up the signals and detected tiny Doppler shifts in their frequency that betrayed the probe's motion as it was blown about by Titan's winds.

Astronomers have calculated wind speeds of 400 kilometres per hour about 150 kilometres above Titan's surface, but only a few metres per second at the surface itself. However, midway through its descent the probe appeared to be unexpectedly buffeted by rapidly fluctuating winds. "[That] is a bit of a surprise," says Michael Bird of the University of Bonn, Germany, head of the Doppler wind speed experiment.
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