Titan’s new pole: Implications for the Huygens entry and descent trajectory and landing coordinates

The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe separated from the NASA Cassini spacecraft on 25 December 2004, after having been attached for a 7-year interplanetary journey and three orbits around Saturn. The probe reached the predefined NASA/ESA interface point on 14 January 2005 at 09:05:52.523 (UTC). It performed a successful entry and descent sequence and softly landed on Titan’s surface on the same day at 11:38:10.77 (UTC) with a speed of about 4.54 m/s. Since the publication of the official project entry and descent trajectory reconstruction effort by the Descent Trajectory Working Group in 2007 (referred to as DTWG#4) various other efforts have been performed and published. This paper presents an overview of the most relevant reconstructions and compares their methodologies and results. Furthermore, the results of a new reconstruction effort (DTWG#5) are presented, which is based on the same methodology as DTWG#4 but takes into account new estimates of Titan’s pole coordinates which were derived from radar images of different Cassini Titan flybys. It can be shown that the primary effect can be observed in the meridional direction which is represented by a stark southward shift of the trajectory by about 0.3 deg. A much smaller effect is seen in the zonal direction (i.e., less than 0.01 deg in the west to east direction). The revised probe landing coordinates are 192.335 deg W and 10.573 deg S. A comparison of these coordinates with results of recent landing site investigations using visual and radar images of the Cassini VIMS instrument shows excellent agreement of the two independently derived landing coordinates, i.e., longitude and latitude residuals of respectively 0.035 deg and 0.007 deg.