Incredible Video: Landing on Titan

Curious what it would be like to mount a camera on the belly of a spacecraft hurtling through the atmosphere of a distant moon, then crash landing -- all in real time? Get the 11MB video of Huygens smacking into Titan right here -- then view this... and prepare to be amazed.

All the juicy details are here.

"This movie, built with data collected during the European Space Agency's Huygens probe on Jan. 14, 2005, shows the operation of the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera during its descent and after touchdown. The camera was funded by NASA. The almost four-hour-long operation of the camera is shown in less than five minutes. That's 40 times the actual speed up to landing and 100 times the actual speed thereafter. The Huygens probe was delivered to Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft, which is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. NASA supplied two instruments on the probe, the descent imager/spectral radiometer and the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer."