RADIO telescopes on Earth have picked up faint signals emitted by the Huygens probe as it descended through the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan on 14 January. This has allowed astronomers to measure the winds on Titan.
Due to a command error, the Cassini orbiter that released Huygens failed to pick up the signals. That meant the wind experiment would have been a total failure, except for the radio telescopes on Earth. Although Huygens was more than a billion kilometres away and its transmitters had roughly the power of a mobile phone, the sensitive telescopes picked up the signals and…
