Well, they're trying to cover all the bases (check the links at the MSNBC article page).

[Peeking at the data stream.

Radio astronomers have recently designed an experiment to allow them to precisely track the probe. This will require several widely-spaced radio telescopes to each detect the weak signals from Huygens during its descent, thus providing advance knowledge of its success or failure prior to the replay of data from Cassini.

The JIVE radio telescope in Dwingeloo, The Netherlands will coordinate a worldwide network of about twenty radio telescopes in an attempt to combine the receptions into one precise path.

“They intend to use a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to pick-up the probe’s faint radio signal here on Earth and use it for reconstruction of the trajectory of descent of the probe in the atmosphere of Titan,” the European Space Agency said earlier this month. The scientists expect to be able to pinpoint the probe’s location to within about half a mile at a range of 900 million miles.

To practice, the network has already tuned in to the beacon on Huygens twice in the last four months, while it was orbiting Saturn still attached to Cassini.

Playbook for a space playback

Huygens is expected to feel the first wisps of Titan's atmosphere at 790 miles (1270 km) above the moon's surface, a destination it is set to reach at 4:07 AM ET on Jan. 14. Fifteen minutes earlier, a timer is supposed to wake up the probe so that it can begin sending data back to Cassini

The probe is expected to take about 135 minutes, give or take 15, to make the descent to the surface, all the while streaming its observations (including more than a thousand images) skyward. Two separate channels are used for redundancy. One data stream lags the other by six seconds, so that a brief communications hiccup wouldn't result in the loss of any information.

If Huygens survives its landing on Titan, it could continue to send data from the surface for some time, but the batteries are charged only to last 156 minutes, with possibly about half an hour more power.

Only after the last possible radio receptions are received from the probe will Cassini begin transmitting the precious signals to Earth. Multiple copies of the data will be stashed in different locations in the spacecraft's computer memory, so that any circuit failure won’t lose it, and the data will be sent back to Earth more than a dozen times during the next day. Racing at the speed of light, the signals will take more than an hour to cross the chilling distance of space from Saturn to Earth.

The first full copy of the data set should begin to arrive on Earth at 10:24 AM ET on Jan. 14, and be completed within half an hour. Only then will the world know the fate of the Huygens probe.]

From: MSNBC's James O'Berg

Just got a peek at Saturn through my binocs... it's been raining and very cloudy to take the big scope out, but must give that a try. :)