英语听力：自然百科 行星旅行：土星 Saturn—13

 Planet earth never attempted to land on such a distant world before. With Huygens’ probe on final approach to Titan, operations switch to European mission control. 

 

The probe hurtled into Titan’s atmosphere at 6km a second, the atmosphere would have been glowing violent around the probe as it decelerated. Once on a parachute, the probe descended¹ for the first 80 miles, seeing nothing but smog and haze². 

 

As we got closer to the surface down into about 30km, the surface features started to peak through with the haze. Progressively this landscape emerged, all these bright hills cut by small dark channels that show there had been rain, definitely some time in the past. 

 

The signal was taking over an hour to reach earth.. No doubt, Huygens was sending postcards from the edge.

 

There are just 20 of us in the office area where the pictures were delivered, it was dark in Germany, it was the winter. You really felt like we were out there gazing at this alien world that was just at our doorstep. 

 

The probe drifted further, snapping these remarkable³ images all the way down. We all kind of saw, you know, our backyard in Arizona, or the friends in revere⁴, wherever it was, you were from, you sort of saw some aspect of Titan that looked familiar. 

 

They were everything whether our images from orbit or not, because you could see a dendritic drainage pattern that looked like a river system, just like a river system would appear on the earth. Boy, that was heady, that was like, oh, it was like Joes Verdun come true, it was just spectacular.

 

1 descended   

a.为...后裔的，出身于...的

参考例句：

• A mood of melancholy descended on us. 一种悲伤的情绪袭上我们的心头。
• The path descended the hill in a series of zigzags. 小路呈连续的之字形顺着山坡蜿蜒而下。

2 haze   

n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊

参考例句：

• I couldn't see her through the haze of smoke.在烟雾弥漫中，我看不见她。
• He often lives in a haze of whisky.他常常是在威士忌的懵懂醉意中度过的。

3 remarkable   

adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的

参考例句：

• She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
• These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。

4 revere   

vt.尊崇，崇敬，敬畏

参考例句：

• Students revere the old professors.学生们十分尊敬那些老教授。
• The Chinese revered corn as a gift from heaven.中国人将谷物奉为上天的恩赐。