Show Date: January 18 , 2005

EXPLORING NEW WORLDS
Pam Eastlick for the Marianas Variety

Greetings and welcome to The Deep column and the deepest radio show on Earth. The Deep is the science talk radio program that takes you from the depths of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the universe. This week on The Deep hosted by Jim Sullivan and aired at 6:00 Wednesday evening on K-57, we’ll talk about astounding new discoveries from our space robots. We’ll also talk about the launch of another wandering robot with an explosive mission and we’ll continue our expedition calls from the tsunami-ravaged regions of the Indian Ocean.

The space robot Huygens completed its mission to Titan last Friday night with resounding success. The probe, built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and piggybacked on the NASA Cassini mission was released from the Cassini mother ship on Christmas Day on a direct collision course with Saturn’s moon, Titan. Titan is always covered with orange clouds and we couldn’t see the surface. Radar pictures didn’t help much since we had no idea if the light and dark patches we saw on the surface were liquid, solid or something in between.
Just before the probe entered the Titanian atmosphere, it was awakened by three sequential alarm clocks. There was no control of this process from Earth since Saturn and Cassini are so far away from Earth that radio signals from the mother ship take over 1½ hours to make the trip. Huygens was scheduled to ‘wake up’ at around 7:20 p.m. last Friday, and ESA scientists spent a grueling hour and a half waiting for the ‘dial tone’ that said that Huygens was awake and on the job.
Huygens deployed three parachutes, one after another, to slow its descent and it took two and a half hours to reach Titan’s surface. It was designed to slowly spin on the way down and the cameras in the bottom of the spacecraft took sequential pictures all the way in.

	My favorite shot is the one that looks like a typical Alaskan seacoast as seen from an airplane. It was taken from an altitude of around 25,000 feet, a typical flight altitude of a small commercial plane. The dark ‘sea’ isn’t water, of course, and the ESA and NASA scientists will be pouring over the Huygens data for weeks to see if it can tell them what the ‘sea’ actually is. The flow channels certainly point to liquid of some kind on Titan’s surface.
Huygens took another picture of what appears to be the same region but from higher up. The flow channels are very prominent.
	The probe landed on a solid surface and the first color photo returned showed unsurprisingly that the light that reaches Titan’s surface colors everything a lovely orange. The ‘rocks’ in the foreground are probably made of water ice. At Titan’s balmy –280 degree surface temperature, water IS a rock.

There will be many more pictures from Titan. The project scientists estimate that Huygens relayed more than 300 pictures to Cassini, who in turn relayed them to Earth. Welcome to a strange new world!

HUNTING WITH THE BIG GUNS
Last week we launched an interesting spacecraft. Like Cassini/Huygens, it’s a two-parter, and one of the ‘parts’ is also scheduled to land on another world. But it won’t be a nice soft landing with parachutes and it won’t be on a moon. The Deep Impact mission is to a comet and the part that ‘lands’ is all set to blow a crater in the comet that will be somewhere between the size of a house and the size of a football field, depending on the density of the comet. It should be between 50 and 300 feet deep.

Comets are thought to be primitive and untouched remnants of the original solar system and scientists are eager to study one. The non-destructive part of Deep Impact will take pictures, record other scientific data, and beam it back to Earth.
Deep Impact is scheduled to hit Comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July this year. Astronomers expect the explosion to make the comet brighter and amateur astronomers are poised to watch the event. Comet Tempel 1 just might become bright enough to see without a telescope and I’ll tell you all about where to watch for it in Guam’s sky in future issues of The Deep.

We’ll also talk some more about the tsunami on The Deep this week. Don’t miss it! You can also log on to www.thedeepradioshow.com for more information.