EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS MAKE AVAILABLE INFORMATION ON:

(1)   EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI

(2)   HUYGEN MISSION TO TITAN

(1)     The European Commission has a section on its internet site devoted to the earthquake and tsunami which created devastation when it hit South East Asia and African on 26^th December 2004.  The  address of the ‘portal page’ is :http://europa.eu.int/tsunami/index_en.htm

Some of the extracts from this page are referenced below:

Civil Protection Mechanism: one emergency number for the entire EU:  An article outlines how EU Member States are alerted and relief efforts monitored by means of the Civil Protection Mechanism. ‘One phone number: 112’   read the full article

EU to back early warning quake system:  The EU is supporting such a system, reflecting its belief that if the Indian Ocean region had had a fully functioning warning system, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. Coastal populations would have had enough time to reach higher ground before the gigantic waves struck – hours after the initial earthquake in many of the devastated countries   read the full article

EU Donations or Pledges as at 13^th January 2005 amounted to:
Donations made by members of the public : €0.92 billion ($1.21 billion) National Governments and European Commission : €1.54 billion ($2.04 billion) Total : €2.46 billion ($3.25 billion)
Plus, € 1 billion pledged in Reconstruction loans via the European Investment Bank

The European Parliament  The European Parliament  discussed the disaster at an 11^th January meeting MEP members of Parliament's committees on development, foreign affairs and budgets.  Also present at the meeting were the following EU Commissioners: Mr. Louis Michel (Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid), Mrs. Benita Ferrero Waldner (Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy) and Mrs. Dalia Grybauskaite (Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budgets) and Mr. Jean-Louis Schiltz, Luxembourg Minister for Co-operation, and the Executive Director of Oxfam, Jeremy Hobbs.  Discussions were on a more delicate issue of balancing aid to ensure that development aid did not suffer as a result of diverting major funding to tsunami victims and related reconstruction.  (Related article is found on: http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+PRESS+NR-20050111-1+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&L=EN&LEVEL=2&NAV=X&LSTDOC=N#SECTION1

The incoming Presidency and the Tsunami disaster:  The Presidency called an extraordinary meeting of the Council of the European Union for 7th January.  The Presidency and EU were in close contact with the United Nations and its agencies, which have to assume the overarching coordination role in the affected region.

Luxembourg’s Minister for Justice Luc Frieden, called for improvements in the cooperation of the police and judicial systems in Europe to better assist with identification of missing persons following the tsunami in south-east Asia. In his capacity as current president of the Council of Justice and Home Affairs, Luc Frieden consider it necessary to provide a European framework to the work of identifying victims who are European nationals. “The rapid and automated exchange of information provided for in the Hague programme on the area of freedom, security and justice adopted by the European Council of November 2004 should be implemented rapidly..." he declared.  Minister Frieden intends to assess the situation when he presides at the informal meeting of ministers for Justice and Home Affairs,  at  the end of January.http://www.eu2005.lu/en/actualites/communiques/2005/01/05frieden/index.html

The press around Europe has written a great deal about the December 2004 tsunami and its 
consequences.  Awareness was all the greater since many European holiday-makers were 
affected by this disaster – the death toll around Europe is still not entirely clear. On matters 
of policy and response to this disaster, prior to the United Nations sponsored conference 
in Kobe, Japan, it was also reported in the European press (European Voice edition of 13th 
January 2005) that the EU plans to create an EU Crisis Management Unit to plan and 
co-ordinate the Union’s response to future disasters.  Apparently this is being considered by 
member states following the Indian Ocean tsunami.  In its 20th January edition, the same 
publication indicated that the European Commission has acknowledged that to bring tangible 
benefits, it is necessary to rewrite the trade rules applying to the countries affected by the 
tsunami. Peter Mandelson, the trade commissioner, has asked the Article 133 committee, a 
body covering trade policy in the Council of Ministers, to see how the terms of access for 
goods from  the countries affected can be made  more preferential.

(2)  The European Space Agency (ESA) is celebrating one of the greatest successes in its history, following the Huygens probe's safe touchdown on the surface of Titan - Saturn's largest moon - on 14 January 2005

Touchdown followed a seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft.   The ESA’s Hugens probe was released from the Cassini mothership on 25^th December – it reached the outer atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon after 20 days and a 4 million km cruise. The probe started its descent through Titan’s hazy cloud layers from an altitude of about 1270 km at 11:13 CET. During the following three minutes Huygens had to decelerate from 18 000 to 1400 km per hour.

Huygens is mankind’s first successful attempt to land a probe on another world in the outer Solar System.  ESA Director General, Jean-Jacques Dordain defined this as  “… a great achievement for Europe and its US partners in this ambitious international endeavour to explore the Saturnian system”. Professor David Southwood, Director of ESA’s scientific programme confirmed that “Titan was always the target in the Saturn system where the need for ‘ground truth’ from a probe was critical”.

Huygens data, relayed by Cassini, were picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network and delivered immediately to ESA’s European Space Operation Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, where the scientific analysis commenced immediately.  One of the main reasons given for sending the Huygens probe to Titan was that its “its nitrogen atmosphere, rich in methane, and its surface may contain many chemicals of the kind that existed on the young Earth. Combined with the Cassini observations, Huygens will afford an unprecedented view of Saturn’s mysterious moon”.

The Cassini-Huygens mission has been a result of cooperation between NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI, the Italian space agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is managing the mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. It is considered that there is enough data from the mission to keep Huygens scientists busy for months and even years to come.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMQ1QQ3K3E_2.html

All Huygens raw images are now available.