Huygens

Key facts

Mission & specifications

Mission

Huygens made the most distant landing humanity has ever achieved — touching down on Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, nearly a billion and a half kilometres from Earth. Named for the Dutch astronomer who discovered Titan in 1655, the European probe rode to Saturn bolted to NASA's Cassini orbiter, a journey of almost seven years, before being released to fall toward the one moon in the Solar System wrapped in a thick, hazy atmosphere. No one knew what lay beneath Titan's orange smog. On 14 January 2005, Huygens entered the atmosphere and parachuted down for two and a half hours, sampling the air and photographing the world emerging below. The images stunned scientists: branching river channels, rounded pebbles, shorelines and broad plains — a landscape shaped by flowing liquid, but a liquid far too cold to be water. On Titan it is methane and ethane that fall as rain, carve rivers and pool into lakes, in a frigid mirror of Earth's own weather. Huygens came to rest on a damp, sandy surface scattered with rounded ice cobbles and kept transmitting for over an hour before its batteries died and Cassini sailed beyond range. In those few hours it returned the first and only data ever gathered from the surface of an outer-Solar-System world — revealing Titan not as a frozen curiosity but as a strange, weirdly familiar landscape, the most Earth-like alien world yet found.

1. 1997Launch aboard CassiniLaunch

   The Huygens probe departs for Saturn bolted to NASA's Cassini orbiter.

2. 2004Release from CassiniMilestone

   After nearly seven years, Huygens separates and coasts toward Titan.

3. 2005Landing on TitanLanding

   The most distant landing ever — Huygens parachutes to Titan and reveals methane rivers and a frozen plain.

4. 2005Battery expiresMission end

   Huygens transmits for over an hour on the surface before its batteries fade and Cassini moves out of range.

Images

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