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Friday, January 14, 2005

Yes!

The ESA reports ground-based dishes were detecting traces of a 'very rich' data stream from Huygens for at least an hour and forty-five minutes after it hit the surface. Everything suggests so far that everything worked perfectly for the descent -- the chutes opened as planned, the lights illuminating the surface for the spectral work came on -- and, most beautifully of all, the probe arrived on the surface still functioning, and still transmitting data back to Cassini. Provided Cassini relays it all properly, we'll have data from Titan's surface around 11:14 ET.

It landed. The damn thing landed. Un-fucking-believable.

The brief wait now is for Cassini to get into position to transmit, and then for radio waves from Cassini to cross that 9.5 AU or so. Cassini will be in position to relay it back to us in about another ten minutes, but the relayed transmissions won't get to Earth for more than an hour past this...

Damn. That's just a beautiful thing.