NASA is helping commemorate the landing of the Huygens space probe on Saturn's moon Titan 10 years ago with the release of photos and a video celebrating the first landing on an outer solar system moon.
The mission was a collaborative effort between the European Space Agency, who build the Huygens probe, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which built the Cassini orbiter that carried Huygens to its rendezvous with the icy Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
The European lander was named for the 17th century Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens who discovered Titan during telescopic studies in 1655.
In a two-hour parachute descent in January 2005, the Huygens probe descended to the moon's surface, from where it sent photos and data to Cassini for transmission back to Earth.
It continued sending from Titan's freezing surface for an hour before its batteries died.
Scientists in participating nations are still pouring over the volumes of data 10 years later.
"A mission of this ambitious scale represents a triumph in international collaboration," says Earl Maize, Cassini Project manager at JPL.
"From the mission's formal beginning in 1982, to Huygens' spectacular landing 23 years later, to the present day, Cassini-Huygens owes much of its success to the tremendous synergy and cooperation between more than a dozen countries," he says.
Before Huygens reached the surface, Titan's covering haze -- thick layers of photochemical "smog" that make it the solar system's only moon to possess an atmosphere -- had hidden its secrets.
Those included seas and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons including methane and ethane, making Titan the only solar system body other than Earth to have liquid flowing on its surface.
Titan also has large regions of sand dunes similar to those found in Earthly deserts, except rather than composed of silicates like on Earth scientists suspect the grains of Titan's dunes are solid water ice coated with hydrocarbon "rain" falling from the moon's atmosphere.
"In some ways Titan is the most Earth-like world in the solar system," says John Zarnecki, who was principle investigator for the Huygens Surface Science Package. "The processes are the same, but the materials are totally alien. It's a truly fascinating place."
The combined Cassini-Huygens mission launched in October 1997. The two spacecraft separated in December 2004 and the Huygens probe landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.
