January 14, 2005
Positive News
We are living through amazing times and we don’t even know it. Despite all of the negative news reports we have heard and tragedies that have been endured, there was some truly incredible news from Titan. Titan is a moon circling Venus and, after a seven year journey, the space probe Huygens safely descended to the surface of Titan after a ride on the back of its mother ship Cassini.
It is so hard to believe that we can create a craft that can travel 1 billion miles and still function as promised seven years later. I can remember when I was working as a multimedia programmer in a planetarium working night after night to get a special effects projector to align a NASA rendering of Huygens dropping onto an artists rendering of Titan more than seven years ago. I can remember thinking that seven years in the future seemed like an eternity. My son was only 4 years old when the people with the vision and foresight to build this machine launched it on its journey.
I wonder how the future will treat this acquisition of knowledge. Will it be lost amid all of the other things going on in the world or, will these types of discoveries have a much more profound impact than so much of what we think is important today?
The press kit is here. And the first images from the surface of a world that we have never seen before can be found here.
Posted by Rovy at January 14, 2005 9:07 PM