On January 14, 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Huygens remains the first and only landing in any location in the outer solar system, the furthest distance from Earth a spacecraft has reached.
The voyage was a collaboration between the European Space Agency and its mothership, Cassini, a NASA spacecraft. Cassini’s project manager Earl Maize recalled, “A mission of this ambitious scale represents a triumph in international collaboration.”
“The Cassini Huygens owes much of its success to tremendous synergy and cooperation between more than a dozen countries,” Maize said. Maize, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the project started in 1982 and spanned over 32 years.
The Huygens probe spent 7 years attached to the Cassini mothership, followed by a 21-day independent journey towards the moon. The descent onto Titan lasted about 2 hours. Huygens gathered data for 72 minutes before its batteries died, providing scientists with information about the outer solar system.
The images taken after landing on the moon revealed that Titan has extremely similar Earth-like features and is nicknamed as an “alien Earth”. Photos captured revealed lakes and seas, but they were made of liquid methane and ethane. The moon is the only other location in the solar system where liquid flows across its surface, similar to Earth.
The probe also revealed that Titan experiences rainfall of liquid methane, and, like Earth, it forms clouds through evaporation and condensation. Through this process, methane rises from the ground, forms clouds, and then produces rainfall. This cycle has visibly impacted Titan’s surface.
Titan is also home to sand dunes, similar to those found on Earth. However, scientists believe the sand is composed of ice formed from hydrocarbons from the atmosphere. The images taken on the probe reveal the dunes to be massive, between 0.6 to 1.2 miles wide, hundreds of miles long, and reaching a height of 300 feet.
The probe found Ligeia Mare, one of Titan’s seas, is about 560 feet deep. Scientists discovered the depth of a body of open liquid in another place on the planet for the first time. Because the liquid on Titan was clear methane, Huygen’s radar signal was able to identify it effortlessly.
Huygens was a pivotal achievement at the time, providing scientists with information about deep-space exploration for the first time.
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