It’s a foggy day here in the Salt Lake Valley, the kind of weather that shrinks your world down to a couple hundred feet in any direction and coats everything in a clammy layer of moisture that isn’t quite substantial enough to be actual water but is definitely a couple of notches below “dry.” I usually don’t mind days like this — unlike a lot of people I know, I don’t find them depressing and they don’t make me feel claustrophobic — but today I’m longing for some broader horizons. I’d love to be able to fly like Superman, so I could pierce through that numbingly gray ceiling and soar up into the sky, higher and higher until I reach the colorful and wonder-filled universe that lies above the earth. I can’t actually do that, of course… but through the magic of the InterWeb, I can vicariously experience some of the wonders that a little machine called Huygens has found.

If you’ll forgive that long and somewhat silly wind-up, I’d like to pitch the ball in the direction of the European Space Agency’s Web site, where there’s a fresh press release detailing some of the lander’s discoveries. It’s pretty amazing stuff. It turns out that Titan is simultaneously much like Earth, with “geological evidence for precipitation, erosion, mechanical abrasion and other fluvial activity” — that means flowing liquid that has shaped rivers and lakes — and impossibly alien, since that flowing liquid is most likely methane, a poisonous and flammable gas here on Earth but quite a different substance in the unbelievable cold of the outer solar system. In addition, data from Huygens has confirmed the presence of hydrocarbons, the building blocks of life, and ordinary water on the surface, although these substances are literally frozen as hard as rocks. There’s even evidence of volcanic activity on Titan, only instead of hot molten rock like we get on this planet, the Titanian volcanoes have spewed out water ice and ammonia. As Spock always used to say, fascinating…
Poking around the ESA’s site a little, I found a colorized photo of Titan’s surface that is supposed to be a pretty accurate rendering of what the surface really looks like (based on spectrographic data) as well as a gallery of raw, unprocessed images sent back by the probe. The aerial photos taken during Huygen‘s descent are especially intriguing, as you can plainly see the riverbeds, delta-like structures, and “shorelines” that have scientists so excited.

Finally, my friend Mike Gillilan sent me a link to the Planetary Society‘s page of Sounds from the Huygens “Microphone.” I’ve been looking forward to this data like a kid looks forward to Christmas morning; as I mentioned a couple days ago, I’ve been very enchanted with the romantic notion of hearing the winds of another world. Well, now I’ve heard them…
And I’m not sure what to think. The experience wasn’t disappointing, exactly — these sounds originated on another planet, after all, and that’s inherently mind-blowing — but it wasn’t what I was expecting either. Which is a stupid thing to say, because what could I possibly have been expecting, since no one’s ever heard another planet’s wind before? Maybe I’ve seen too many Star Trek re-runs and thought the sounds would be something like the eerie moaning effects used in so many episodes. They very definitely are not like those.

There are actually three basic sound files from Huygens: one is the probe’s radar altimeter, one is the sounds heard during the descent through Titan’s atmosphere, and the final one consists of sounds recorded after the landing. The third one isn’t very impressive. The Web site says that these “on-the-ground” sounds were likely generated inside the microphone itself, which makes sense since they are reminiscent of good old-fashioned “tape hiss.” The radar sounds are kind of cool, but are basically the same thing we’ve heard in dozens of submarine movies as the torpedo acquires its target and homes in for the kill. The only Huygens recording that really sounds like anything a human ear can make sense of is the first one, the one taken during the descent, and I’m sorry to say that there’s nothing really, well, unearthly about them. The sounds are very much like what you hear in your car when you’re driving on the freeway with the radio off: just a rushing, whooshing kind of noise. As I said, this is still pretty remarkable when you consider where these noises came from, but just on their own they were rather a let-down. Still, you ought to go over and listen to them, if you have the hardware for it.

Have a good weekend, kids — I’ll catch you on the flip-side.