A probe destined to descend into the atmosphere of Saturn’s giant moon,
Titan, is threatened by a glitch which may stop it sending back data. The
Huygens probe, built by the European Space Agency and carried by NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft, will reach Saturn in late 2004. Cassini will then launch Huygens and
relay its data as it descends. But engineers have found that the receiver on
Cassini cannot pick up its designed range of frequencies, so its movement
relative to Huygens could Doppler-shift the signals enough to cut data
transmission by 90 per cent.
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