Titan's pebbles 'seen' by Huygens radio (ESA)

[eppur_se_muova]

25 July 2006
An unexpected radio reflection from the surface of Titan has allowed ESA scientists to deduce the average size of stones and pebbles close to the Huygens’ landing site. The technique could be used on other lander missions to analyse planetary surfaces for free.

When Huygens came to rest on the surface of Titan on 14 January 2005, it survived the impact and continued to transmit to the Cassini mothership, orbiting above. Part of that radio signal 'leaked' downwards and hit the surface of Titan before being reflected back up to Cassini. On its way up, it interfered with the direct beam.

As Miguel Pérez-Ayúcar, a member of the Huygens Team at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in The Netherlands, and his colleagues watched the signal coming back, they were initially puzzled to see the power of the signal rising and falling in a repetitive manner.

“Huygens had not been designed to necessarily survive impact so we had never thought about what the signal would look like from the surface,” says Pérez. After making a joke that aliens must be dragging the craft along the surface, Pérez and the team began work at once to understand the signal.

The clue was the repetitive oscillation of the power. It made Pérez think about the interaction of the direct signal with that reflecting from the surface of Titan. As Cassini travelled away from the Huygens landing site, the angle between it and Huygens changed. This altered the way in which the interference between the reflected and direct beams was detected, perhaps causing the variation in power.
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more: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM23SVT0PE_index_0.html (Although this appears to be a news release, it is not explicitly labeled as such, so I'm keeping to the five-para limit.)