12 years of a Historic Descent to Titan

Huygens. Image Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

It was January 14, 2005 when the Huygens space probe landed on Titan, near the Xanadu region, it took two-and-a-half-hour descent, coming to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, the temperature there hundreds of degrees below freezing. 

This was a truly historical moment in space exploration, the probe recorded and transmitted images and data about its environs, Huygens, a project of the European Space Agency, was carried aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which got separated from its mothership on Dec. 24, 2004, for a 20-day coast toward its destiny at Titan.

Surface of Titan. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Huygens sampled Titan's dense, hazy atmosphere as it slowly rotated beneath its parachutes, analyzing the complex organic chemistry and measuring winds, bringing back hundreds of images during the descent, revealing bright, rugged highlands that were crosscut by dark drainage channels and steep ravines. The place where it landed was a dark, granular surface, which resembled a dry lakebed.

The soft landing on Titan was the first one carried out on an outer-planet moon, also this operation rendered visible the moon's surface and features something not possible from orbit, which has to be carry out with radar images due to the dense atmosphere the moon possesses reveling a landscape which that mimics Earth in so many ways. This is so far the most distant landing to date that we have achieved and which yield lots of scientific discoveries. 

Touchdown of the Huygens space probe, Credit: ESA

Sources: NASA, Cassini, ESA, Wikipedia.