Landing on Titan

Celebrating the 2015 tenth anniversary of the Huygens probe’s descent to the surface of Saturn’s giant moon

Just over a decade ago, on 14 January 2005, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe separated from NASA’s Cassini orbiter around Saturn, and began its descent onto Titan. Although it only transmitted data from the surface for 72 minutes before losing contact with Cassini, and a problem with its programming meaning half the images and data it received was lost, Huygens was still considered a huge success. It’s the only successful soft landing on a world in the outer Solar System, the images returned are the first taken from a surface in the outer Solar System, and Huygens remains the most distant landing of any man-made spacecraft today. The images taken here showed, for the first time, what was beneath the impenetrable yellow haze of Titan’s dense nitrogen atmosphere: a…

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