Titan welcomes humanity and imagining Saturn this week on planetary radio. Radio. That was the sound of a bunch of Old World Europeans reacting to one of the greatest

space exploration successes in history.

Welcome to our special coverage of the Huygens probe on Saturn's Moon Titan.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

We're going to dispense with space headlines today so that we'll have more time to recap this extraordinary

accomplishment. You won't hear Emily Loch Duolle's Q&A segment either, but you will

hear Emily reporting from the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

Later in the show we'll get reactions from Bill Nye the Science Guy, former NASA Associate

Administrator Wes Huntress, actor and Space Enthusi, John Reese Davies, and others.

But the real star is the Huygens probe itself.

And here it is.

We take you back to Friday, January 14.

What you're about to hear is the actual sound of a 2.5 hour descent through the thick

atmosphere of Titan compressed into 10 seconds.

Did you notice how it got much quieter at the end?

Hoegans had plopped down onto the surface of Titan

where it would spend far more time returning data than anyone had expected or even hoped.

You can hear much more sound from the probe's microphone at the Planetary Society website,

Planetary.org.

The Society had partnered with the European Space Agency to process and publish these audio

portraits from the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere.

We've also posted a tremendous amount of information about Titan, Saturn, Cassini, and Huygans, including many of the 350

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