The European Space Agency's Huygens probe is heading for Titan, Saturn's largest moon, aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Titan's orange, chemical-heavy atmosphere is thought to resemble that of a young Earth, meaning it could hold the secret to the origins of life. Huygens will penetrate the moon's atmosphere and, during a brief descent, analyze the physical and chemical environment. The probe is named after Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) who first detected Saturn's rings and its giant moon.

Huygens remote-sensing instruments use visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, and radar. These will record details of Titan's chemical make-up, its weather and clouds, and surface. A shield will protect the probe from 12,000-degree heat as it enters the atmosphere. Parachutes will slow its descent and stabilize it, allowing the instruments to do their work. If the probe survives the impact, it will continue to send back data as long as its batteries last or until the Cassini orbiter is out of range.

In order to get the maximum scientific return from available resources, the wave experimenters on Cluster established the Wave Experiment Consortium (WEC). The WEC's scientific objectives are described, together with its capability to achieve them in the course of the mission. WEC has organized technical coordination for experiment pre-delivery tests and spacecraft integration and tests, and has also established associated working groups for data analysis and operations in orbit. All science operations aspects of WEC have been worked out in meetings with wide participation of scientists from five WEC instrument teams.

The five WEC experiments are designed to measure quasi-static electric fields, electric and magnetic fluctuations and small-scale plasma density structures in the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind. These experiments are: EFW, STAFF, WHISPER, WBD and DWP.

The Cluster community includes 11 Principal Investigators and more than 200 Co-Investigators from Europe, the United States, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan and Russia.

Collaborators
French-USA members of the WEC collaborating via STAR TAP: Centre de Recherches en Physique de L'Environnement Terrestre et Planetaire (CETP), France; University of Berkeley Space Science Laboratory, USA; University of Iowa (Iowa City), USA

http://www.estec.esa.nl/spdwww/cluster/html2/wec.html
http://www.estec.esa.nl/spdwww/cluster/html2/exp.html