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NIA Seminar by Carlo Bettanini |
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Date: March 30, 2006
Time: 10:30 am
Location: NIA, Rm 137
The Huygens Mission: A Successful Descent in the Titan Atmosphere. Expected and Unexpected Behaviours of a Complex Scientific Probe
Carlo Bettanini, University of Padova, Italy
On January 14th 2005 ESA's Huygens probe,after its seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft, successfully descended through the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and safely landed on its surface. The mission demonstrated the way a great inter agencies colaboration may drive to excellent technical and scientific achievement.
This lecture will give a brief an overview of the Huygens mission, starting from nominal Huygens mission profile and underlying some of the most exiciting results obtained by the instruments onboard Huygens mission. In parallel to this focus of the lecture will be to highlight that unexpexted is always present when dealing with complex scientific systems and that redundancy, smart engineering and keen data analysis should always be the base of every real project. Therefore some of the "on the road" changes to mission configuration that were necessary in order to guarantee the scientific return will be highlighted as well as some of the elaboration of scientific data which drew to corrected interpration of probe behaviour.
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