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PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 24) - With a gentle shove on Christmas Eve, the Cassini spacecraft will launch the European Space Agency's Huygens probe on a course that should send it plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn's big moon Titan. The probe must be released precisely on course because it has no means of maneuvering and will remain dormant until a timer wakes it up for entry into Titan's hazy, hydrocarbon-laced atmosphere and a parachute descent to the surface on Jan. 14. Confirmation of a successful release should be received by NASA's Deep Space Network antennas in Spain and Goldstone, Calif., just before 11 p.m. EST Friday, Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. The $3.3 billion Cassini-Huygens mission, a project of NASA, ESA and the Italian space agency, was launched on Oct. 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to study Saturn, its spectacular rings and many moons. During the nearly seven years Cassini took to reach the ringed planet, the attached probe was powered through an umbilical cable and awakened from sleep mode every six months for tests. Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in June and has made several passes by Titan in preparation for the probe's release. Friday evening, tension-loaded springs will push Huygens away from Cassini on a free-fall toward Titan. On Monday, Cassini will perform a course change to avoid following the probe into Titan. Huygens is designed to make a 2 1/2-hour descent by parachute to the surface of the moon, which, according to some theories, could have lakes of methane. Instruments aboard the probe will investigate the atmosphere's chemistry and cameras will try to record images of the surface. It's not known whether Huygens will drop into liquid or onto a hard surface, where it may operate for a few minutes. As long as it is operating, Huygens will be transmitting data back to Cassini, which will later turn around to point its antenna at Earth and send the data to the Deep Space Network and on to ESA's Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.
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