Huygens blog: "A dance party to Titan."

You can hear some weird techno sounds from Titan in a sound file that was made from the Huygens HASI RADAR altimeter instrument data. Marcello Fulchignoni had described these sounds as a "dance party to Titan" when he played them at the press conference this morning. The techno sounds alternate with something that sounds suspiciously like a heartbeat before the spacecraft achieves a "lock" on the signal reflected from the ground. A very tired Roland Trautner (a member of the HASI team) just gave me these sounds and explained them to me just before he went home to crash from yesterday's dizzying experience.

It seems that everyone here at ESA's European Space Operations Centre has gone home--you can't stay up all night and suffer the highs and lows that everyone here, scientists, engineers, administrators, press officers, reporters, guests, and I went through without needing some time to recover. My Weblog will end here; I'll return to regular news coverage of the Cassini-Huygens mission from now on, updating you with the new images and new discoveries from the Saturn system as they are made.

Congratulations to the Huygens scientists and engineers, ESA, and all the people of Europe and the rest of the Earth for their landing on the surface of an unexplored world.