Credit Eamonn O'Fearchain

An enormous crowd of nearly 500 people packed the Terence Larkin Theatre in DCU, Dublin to hear Prof Carl Murray talk about the Cassini Huygens Mission to Saturn and its Moons.  This was the biggest Astronomy Ireland lecture so far, thanks to the assistance of The Irish Times. It was also probably one of the most exciting.  Cassini Huygens which took seven years to reach Saturn has been a fantastic success so far.

Prof. Murray took time out of his very busy schedule to visit Dublin and share with us his amazing experiences and wonderful images of this ground breaking mission.  He was on the Pat Kenny show in the morning.  In the afternoon he was interviewed by Gareth O'Connor at Dunsink for the 9pm RTE 1 News.  Another RTE crew interviewed him for the "Scope" science program.  So he barely had time to breathe before his lecture.

                                    
                    Credit Eamonn O'Fearchain

Astronomy Ireland was delighted to be associated with "The Irish Times" for this high profile lecture.  The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration ever mounted.  Professor Murray was involved in developing the Cassini imaging system. He gave us a great insight into the behind the scenes development of the technology needed to send back the images of Saturn and its Moons.

 The Huygens imaging system, took hundreds of photographs as it headed towards Titan as well as gathering loads of information on Titan's atmosphere and surface.  It then beamed its radio signals to the orbiter Cassini flying overhead and Cassini in turn sent the collected research data to earth.  Those images of a hitherto largely unknown world are fascinating.  Professor Murray described the mission and what it has achieved as well as showing new images and the latest up to date research results from this amazing world.

                              Credit Tom Finnegan

A special word of thanks to DCU Astrosoc, Amanda Ryan, Dwane Doyle and others who helped out with the event.

Remember IRELAND is a member of E.S.A. It is OUR space agency too so we can be proud. Some of the Cassini software was developed in Ireland for E.S.A. for example.

The pictures will appear in our magazine, please subscribe both to have a record of the historic landing and to support astronomy in Ireland. Click here

Details of the landing and on-going mission from E.S.A. are at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html

Other useful links:

    saturn.esa.int
    saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
    ciclops.org

Professor Carl D. Murray 
BSc in Applied Mathematics with Astrophysics, Queen Mary College, London (1977), PhD in Astronomy, Queen Mary College, London (1980)

• Member of the Cassini Imaging Team
• Co-investigator on the D-CIXS experiment on SMART-1
• Science Associate on Beagle 2