20 days to go

[beren]

Anybody watching the coverage of the Cassini mission , 20 more days until the Huygens probe is launched for its meeting with titan . If you havent checked the nasa page have a look , heaps of info and latest images ......nice one just out shows a small moon near the rings of saturn.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

[iceman]

yeh i'm really looking forward to it.. been following the progress of this mission for a while, very exciting.

The moon picture you're talking about, I posted on the front-page news of IceInSpace (http://www.iceinspace.com) on Friday :P

[loopy]

I've got this one written down in my diary, it's been there for the last 2 years :) Last year was my final year at uni (doing aero engineering), and my thesis was based on a similar topic. It was a design for a high pressure unmanned aquatic robot, designed to be housed inside a cryobot and suitable for subglacial investigation. Ideally, it was designed to be used in both Lake Vostok (subglacial lake in Antarctica) and on Europa, and it's primary purpose was to return photographs and run biological tests on the water. It was very similar to NASA's design for a hydrobot, although I never saw their plans until after it was handed in... :)
I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb now to say we have both the desire to explore and the technology - I firmly believe that the first positive detection of extra-terrestrial life will be discovered within the next ten years. Whether it's going to come from Titan or Europa (or even somewhere else!) though is another debate entirely.... :)