On 14 January ESA’s Huygens probe made an historic first ever descent to the surface of Titan, 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth and the largest of Saturn’s moons. Huygens travelled to Titan as part of the joint ESA/NASA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission. Starting at about 150 kilometres altitude, six multi-function instruments on board Huygens recorded data during the descent and on the surface. The first scientific assessments of Huygens’ data were presented during a press conference

Further insights into Titan were unveiled today (21st January 2005) as scientists involved in the joint NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission presented further results and images a week to the day after the successful descent and arrival of the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon.

Principal Investigator for the Huygens Surface Science Package [SSP], Professor John Zarnecki from the Open University, Milton Keynes, has spent the last week with his team analysing and

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical University Munch have discovered evidence of a phenomenon that may lead to drastically lowering the cost of manufacturing of materials from plastics to fertilizers. Studying nano-sized clusters of gold on a magnesium oxide surface, scientists found direct evidence for electrical charging of a nano-sized catalyst. This is an important factor in increasing the rate of chemical reactions. The research will appear in the 21 January, 2

‘Evil Twin’ hotspots: the latest security threat to web users, according to wireless internet and cyber crime experts at Cranfield University, academic partner of the Defence Academy of the UK.

Dr Phil Nobles, wireless internet and cyber crime expert at the university, will be speaking at the wireless crime event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre – the UK’s only venue for adults to discuss controversial science – on Thursday 20 January 2005 from19.00-20.30. He will explain t

Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion has finally been photographed.

The discovery suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers have overestimated the number of young “brown dwarfs” and “free floating” extrasolar planets. An international team of astronomers lead by University of Arizona Associate Professor La

VLT Finds Young, Very Low Mass Objects Are Twice As Heavy As Predicted

Thanks to the powerful new high-contrast camera installed at the Very Large Telescope, photos have been obtained of a low-mass companion very close to a star. This has allowed astronomers to measure directly the mass of a young, very low mass object for the first time.

The object, more than 100 times fainter than its host star, is still 93 times as massive as Jupiter. And it appears to be almost twice

Paving the way for much more intuitive, interactive, and user-friendly ‘spoken dialogue technology’, DUMAS developed a multilingual speech-based system that creates new ways to communicate.

DUMAS, a three-year IST-funded project, began by developing the Athos platform, a generic and modular framework for multilingual speech-based systems. A consortium of eight partners from Sweden, Finland, Germany and the UK, its researchers built on basic speech technology, such as speech synt

Although Huygens landed on Titan’s surface on 14 January, activity at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, continues at a furious pace. Scientists are still working to refine the exact location of the probe’s landing site, seen above.

While Huygens rests frozen at -180 degrees Celsius on Titan’s landscape, a symbolic finale to the engineering and flight phase of this historic mission, scientists have taken little time off to eat or sleep. They have

One week after the successful completion of Huygens’ mission to the atmosphere and surface of Titan, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn, the European Space Agency is bringing together some of the probe’s scientists to present and discuss the first results obtained from the data collected by the instruments.

After a 4000 million kilometre journey through the Solar System that lasted almost seven years, the Huygens probe plunged into the hazy atmosphere of Titan at 11

For decades, scientists have observed that Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, spins much faster than the sun. But thanks to a powerful new telescopic array, astronomers now know with unprecedented clarity what that means to this massive celestial body.

A group of astronomers, led by Hal McAlister, director of Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, have used the center’s array of telescopes to detect for the first ti

Researchers from the CEA’s Nuclear Energy Division have, for the first time, been able to make a quantitative prediction of the evolution of radiation-induced defects in a structural material. The results obtained for iron, using multi-scale simulation techniques based on the atomic scale, will help provide greater insight into material aging phenomena in existing nuclear power plants and may be applied to nuclear systems of the future. They are to be published in the “Nature Materials” jour

An Internet-based system to help revive flagging areas hit by the decline of traditional heavy industry, such as steel and mining, has been developed with the help of 850,000 euros from the EU’s Framework Programme.

VISION was launched to create an Internet-based system to promote rapid industrial reconversion. This is a major issue for large parts of Europe where the loss of traditional industries left areas of high unemployment and social deprivation, despite many being populated

This picture is a composite of 30 images from ESA’s Huygens probe. They were taken from an altitude varying from 13 kilometres down to 8 kilometres when the probe was descending towards its landing site. View all raw images here: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw/index.htm

Astronomers announced Jan. 10 that they have a lead in the case of the missing disks. The report was presented by UCLA graduate student and Ph.D. candidate Peter Plavchan; his adviser, Michael Jura; and Sarah Lipscy, now at Ball Aerospace, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. This lead may account for the missing evidence of red dwarfs forming planetary systems.

The evidence

Red dwarfs (or M Dwarfs) are stars like our Sun in many respects but smaller,

New results may lead to advances in nanotechnology, molecular electronics

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Bar-Ilan University, and Harvard University have grown ultrathin films of organic chain molecules on the surface of liquid mercury and discovered that the molecules form ordered structures. Similar to sixty years ago when fundamental studies of silicon paved the way to the semiconductor-electronics age, these results help to build

14 January 2005, 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.

The first scientific data arrived at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, this afternoon at 17:19 CET. Huygens is mankind’s first successful attempt to land a probe on another world in the outer Solar System. “This