Spatium 15: Titan and the Huygens Mission
Publication date: 01 November 2005
Journal: SPATIUM
Volume: 15
Issue: November 2005
Year: 2005
Copyright: Association Pro ISSI
The fourteenth day of January 2005 was one of mankind's major milestones, which, like most milestones probably, passed unnoticed by the vast majority. On this day, at 11:30 UTC a spacecraft from planet Earth landed on the surface of Titan, after a journey of more than 3,000,000,000 km. There, the probe remained busy for its short lifetime of a mere seventy minutes before it fell into an eternal sleep. That probe was Huygens, and this article describes the Cassini-Huygens mission and some of the results it returned about the mysterious moon, Titan.
This article is based on a talk given by Professor Nicolas Thomas of the Physikalisches Institut of the Universität Bern to the Pro ISSI.