ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University's Department of Astronomy is inviting the general public and the media to witness, on NASA-TV, the historic first landing of the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, at an open house tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 14.

The open house, in the third-floor Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Facility (SPIF) of the Space Sciences Building, will be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Visitors will be able to view the reports and images of the scientific data returned by the robot vessel from the Saturnian moon as presented on NASA-TV. The first pictures from Titan are expected to arrive between 5 and 6 p.m.

Cornell has several faculty members involved with the Cassini mission to Saturn. Some of them will be present at the open house to answer questions about the saucer-shaped probe's descent through Titan's dense clouds.

The Cornell Cassini team members include Joseph Burns, the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, professor of astronomy and Cornell's vice provost for physical sciences and engineering; Joseph Veverka, professor and chair of the Department of Astronomy; astronomy professors Steve Squyres, Peter Gierasch and Philip Nicholson; and Peter Thomas, senior researcher in astronomy.

Cornell's contributions to the Cassini mission are the two main cameras that take wide and narrow angles of Saturn and its rings and moons, and the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS), which measures the thermal radiation of the object being examined.

The Huygens probe, a project of the European Space Agency, was released from NASA's orbiting Cassini spacecraft Dec. 25 and will become the first spacecraft to make direct contact with the surface of a moon of another planet. Huygens will spend almost three hours drifting down toward Titan's bizarre surface, relaying back to Earth data on the moon's thick atmosphere and images of its landing area. Confirmation that data are being received from Huygens via relay from Cassini will come between 11:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m.One big mystery that scientists eagerly await an answer to is whether Huygens will land on a surface that is solid or slushy, or perhaps even one that is covered in some kind of liquid. Huygens is designed to float in case it comes down on a Titanian lake, which could consist of liquid ethane.