Destination Titan Page #2

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I mean, it was remarkably close.

And we detected about

These are the particles

that make up the tail of a comet.

I think it was a mission that gave Europe confidence

that it could really do ambitious things in space.

After the success of Giotto,

the European Space Agency

were very democratic about selecting

the next scientific mission.

They had five candidate missions

and we got involved in a team

on a mission called Vesta.

Now Vesta was going to fly

past an asteroid

and we were part of the group that was looking

at the possibility of firing some penetrators.

They would be fired into the surface of the asteroid

and make measurements of the physical properties,

and we came to the day of selection and, to

our horror, it wasn't Vesta that they chose.

They selected a mission called

Cassini, going to a place called Titan -

a place that I'd hardly heard of and we

were completely deflated and ejected by this.

I remember still the journey

back to Canterbury from Bruges.

We went on the train and the ferry, and

it was a pretty depressing, glum journey.

We got back to the lab and I said,

"Look, have we really wasted

the last year?

"Is it possible that some of the work

that we've done on the Vesta mission,

"which they didn't choose,

we could actually adapt

"to this strange place Titan that

they were proposing to go to?"

We sat down with a cup of coffee and had a look at

what it was that the European Space Agency had chosen.

Cassini, as proposed, was going to be the most ambitious

space mission ever sent to the outer solar system.

It was planned to carry the first dedicated

set of instruments for Saturn and its system,

and it was to carry a probe that would

detach and land on the surface of Titan.

Now, pretty soon, we realised that

the part of it that really interested

us was the probe, which was going to

descend through Titan's atmosphere.

It was going to make the bulk of

its measurements during the descent.

And we realised how embarrassing it

would be if the thing landed

and it didn't have anything with which

to make measurements on the surface.

So we literally listed

all of the physical properties

that you might want to measure

on the surface of Titan.

We then wrote a proposal in response

to the call for proposals to produce

a quite ambitious, though small, little

instrument called the Surface Science Package.

We beat the deadline by about a day.

We sat and waited for the decision.

And, to our amazement,

we were selected.

A new and very exciting space probe

is being planned for the 1990s.

Dr John Zarnecki is closely

associated with this probe,

and we are delighted to welcome him

now to the Sky at Night

for the first time

but I certainly hope not the last.

Welcome, John. Thank you.

I do my Sky at Night programme.

I did do a programme about Titan,

who to invite on it?

Obviously, John. I didn't know then

what a good broadcaster he was,

and he came and we discussed Titan.

'But, of course, so far,'

we've only been able to

study the top part of it.

We still don't know what the surface is like and

that's the reason for sending up this Titan lander.

Will you tell us about that, John?

I should tell you that it's

already been christened in fact.

It's called the Huygens probe,

named after the Dutch physicist,

Christiaan Huygens,

who discovered Titan.

'I was billed as a Titan expert.'

I hadn't written a single scientific paper about

Titan and this was a very bizarre situation.

He didn't know much about the surface of Titan,

but neither did anybody else, me as much as anybody.

All in all, this is one of the most

ambitious vehicles ever planned,

what do you think are

the chances of success?

We must be optimistic, you would never embark

on a mission like this if one wasn't optimistic.

And I expect that we might be sitting here in 13 years'

time discussing the results from the Cassini mission.

'I think it began to dawn on us, just

in the weeks after we were selected.

'We had to produce an instrument,

one of a set of six

'scientific instruments,

a bit bigger than a shoebox.

'It had to travel in a probe

in deep space for over seven years,

'descend through this thick,

rather mysterious atmosphere

'and then make measurements on this

very alien and unknown surface.

'And it had to give us answers, it

had to make sense of this alien world.'

I mean that was a daunting prospect.

I had to start building up the team.

There were several

critical positions.

Arguably the most important

position is the project manager.

That's the person who really runs the show

day to day and brings the whole thing together.

'OK, one thing we've got to decide is exactly

who to send to the meeting with Peter.'

One of my colleagues knew John

Zarnecki from maybe 10, 15 years earlier

and they said, "I saw John the other day

and he's looking for a project manager,

"why don't you give him a ring?"

And, amazingly, because of him, I

had this new space science career.

The instrument had originally been selected in

When I arrived they'd just really had a few prototypes

on the bench, some of them were very Blue Peter.

I remember a washing-up bottle with

a steel ruler attached that was the

density sensor and the thing was huge and we had

to turn this into an 8g sensor to fly to Titan.

When Mark came on board, there were

two big issues that we had to face.

One was to put the final team together and,

more importantly, was to get the funding.

Because being selected was

only half of the battle.

We then had to get funding

from our national agencies.

'Our funding situation is stable,'

if you call underfunding

a good thing to report.

We were underfunded two years ago and

we're underfunded to the same extent now.

We were cut back to about two-thirds of

what we actually needed to do the job,

so we had to look at clever ways of

getting round the funding shortfall.

This was around the time of perestroika,

when the Iron Curtain was coming down.

NEWSREADER:
Bulldozers tonight began

to open new holes in the Berlin Wall.

Throughout the day, thousands of

people have been crossing freely

from East to West Berlin

and back again.

I saw an opportunity here to use some of the

professional connections that I had with Poland

to see whether we could go there and use their

desire to work with the West in scientific research,

and we found out that they were quite

experienced at building space instruments,

so basically we cut a deal.

They would build

a part of the instrument

in exchange for coming on board and seeing essentially

how space research was done in Western Europe.

Now that was one thing that we did,

the other was to take advantage

of the fact that we were a university

and one thing that universities have

generally in profusion is students,

and, generally,

students are fairly cheap.

I won't quite say

slave labour but nearly.

MUSIC:
"Mirrorball" by Elbow

The whole project seemed a lot like science

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